I came across this question and noticed there were four comments stating the current number of deleted answers.
However, as none of them were up-to-date, I decided to flag them as obsolete.
But here's the weird part: When I later went to see my flag history, one of the flags had been declined.
I went back to the question trying to find the comment for which the flag had been declined. Currently, the only comment that deals with the number of deleted answers is this:
Now 16 answers, all deleted.
That's not obsolete (I assume; because it says "all deleted", unlike the obsolete ones), but this comment with this text was not there when I flagged the four comments.
Proof: See the Comments.xml
file in MathOverflow data dump (from August) and search for 458314
. Which is the id of this comment. The original content of the comment (as can be seen from the Comments.xml
) is this:
Now 16 answers, 14 deleted, the other two downvoted to minus 2.
That's clearly an obsolete comment.
Why was the comment flag declined? I can think of a couple of reasons:
- It's impossible to approve a comment flag without the comment getting deleted. So a moderator saw my flag, agreed with it but decided to update the comment and decline the flag.
- A moderator saw the flag and decided to edit the comment. Then just after that, another user sees the flag and the updated comment. Well, that comment is not obsolete anymore, so the user had to decline the flag.