Post History

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.)

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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.)