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"Needs author's attention" should not be a flag option
When you click on "Flag" under a post, you get a dropdown asking "Why does this post require moderator attention?" One of the options is
needs author's attention
This question is off-topic or cannot be reasonably answered in its current form and needs revision by its author.
This flag will be added as a comment to this post's feedback thread.
The title of the modal is "Why does this post require moderator attention?", but the option is that it "needs author's attention" (emphasis my own). This immediately confuses anyone looking at the flag option. Is the flag going to the author or the moderator, or both? This is slightly clarified by the text below, but it's still something to keep in mind.
Also, it isn't a flag. It doesn't raise a flag. (This is honestly probably the bigger reason)
My suggestion is that it should instead simply be a notice rather than an option. For instance, something like this:
This way, instead of users being able to select and submit a "flag", users are asked directly to add a comment instead, making it much clearer.
2 answers
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It should be a flag.
If a post needs author attention, then it's not ready to be answered and should be closed. Until we get a better close mechanism, this is the only way ordinary users can contribute to getting a question closed. Effectively, only mods can close questions here, so this flag is for alerting a mod that a question needs to be closed.
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We have a change pending to remove this non-flag from the flag list. (There's a story there that I'll get back to.) To the point raised in another answer, people can still use "other" to request closure.
Something that came up in the discussion of this change was: how should we let people flag for closure? "Other" flags are a stopgap, and unlike "needs author's attention" they go to moderators for review. A better fix would be to make the "close" menu available to people who can flag, with the action depending on your abilities: if you can vote to close, it's a close vote; if you can't yet vote to close directly, it turns into a flag.
(Down the road we also want to make close votes a thing, instead of closure being a one-person action.)
--
About that story: flag types for a network are configured in a YAML file, so the actual change here was to disable that flag. Other networks that want to keep the flag need only edit that file to change one boolean value.
Because other networks might want to keep that flag, this change only modified that YAML file and did not also remove the special code that detects this flag type and sets up the comment thread. We have, it turns out, code that depends on specific flag types, currently by name -- I'll be looking into giving flag types immutable IDs instead, so that one person innocently tweaking the a flag's name in that YAML file doesn't break things in surprising ways.
This "simple" one-line change ("even I can do that!", I said) has thus spawned two pieces of related work that we really ought to do. Thanks for helping us notice those. (That's real thanks, not sarcastic thanks; I'd rather find things earlier than later.)
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