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I have noticed a flag to an answer of mine beeing declined with the reason

flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer

While I certainly understand this as a reason to decline flags and the resoning behind this, this site is different than most other Stack Exchange sites. Here, answers can provide completly wrong advice in legal situations - essentially telling people to infringe patents because nobody cares (another example, same question), intimidate other users with empty threats (the answer my flag was declined on) etc.

I don't know how advice like you can totally touch that high voltage cable without protection is handled on other sites, but I would like to see a mechanism other than commenting and downvoting for this kind of answers. They are, after all, wrong. And it can be proven that they are wrong!

This site wants to be the place to go to for advice on patents. How can we allow advice telling people to do something illegal? Is downvote and hope enough people notice so it gets some downvotes the only solution at the moment? If it were a question, I could provide an alternative answer - but comments are not meant to be lasting and have a maximum number of characters, that's not the way to provide a good reasoning on how the answers is just bad, wrong, intimidating, ...

I feel like there should be a way to flag answers as complete and utter garbage or dangerously wrong or following this advice is illegal or something similar.

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    I agree. Not sure if the functionality exists or we are just supposed to rely on down votes and comments.
    – Eric S Mod
    May 27, 2017 at 1:31

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I think standard practice is not to delete answers for simply being wrong, but letting down votes handle the situation. However, I reviewed the posted answer and found it not only wrong, but actually not an answer and also intimidating in a way that I found objectionable. Based on that, I decided to delete I it.

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  • Oh hey, look, you made moderator. Congrats, nice shiny diamond you got there :). And definitely the right choice for Ask Patents :)
    – user18033
    Aug 14, 2020 at 4:20
  • Mostly I just wanted the spam questions deleted promptly.
    – Eric S Mod
    Aug 14, 2020 at 11:29
  • Yes that's good, I also noticed they were staying too long. Sometimes I posted them in the chat of the flagging bot (what was the name?) over at the main site. There are always enough people to get the flags full, but it takes some time doing that on a mobile phone.
    – user18033
    Aug 15, 2020 at 11:50

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