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I recently flagged several link-only answers here, here, and here. Current SE guidance states that "Your answer is over here" or "Take this tutorial (link)" answers are not answers.

All three of my NAA flags were declined with the text "declined - a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it". Why were these flags declined? The question itself was an off-topic resource request that came up in the Close Votes queue that I (properly) voted to close and discovered had several NAA/Very VLQ link-only answers pointing to various tutorals, videos, and other learning resources.

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The question itself was an off-topic resource request

There is your answer. The whole question was off topic, and merited deletion. In such a case vote to close/delete the question, don't go through every single answer and try to delete it individually. You're just creating tons of work that becomes pointless when the question itself is deleted.

Note that the guidelines you yourself linked states exactly this:

There's really only one valid exception to this rule, and that's when the question is:

Suggest me some tutorials where i can learn quick.

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    And to further the point, the 3 questions were, in fact, deleted.
    – Tunaki
    Commented Oct 19, 2016 at 14:15
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    NAA flags are not "evaluate[d...] from the question's perspective", so it's not clear why this would explain the declines.
    – jscs
    Commented Oct 19, 2016 at 14:25
  • @JoshCaswell None of the flagged answers fit in the 5 categories above. In fact, they are the only correct answers to the "Please give some links" questions they are under. Not to say they are worth keeping, but to show that the real issue is the question, so no focus should be made on the answers.
    – Tunaki
    Commented Oct 19, 2016 at 14:39
  • @JoshCaswell The answer states that if you need to read the question to realize that the answer is not an answer, that you should not use the NAA flag. The answer isn't "not an answer", so the statement doesn't apply.
    – Servy
    Commented Oct 19, 2016 at 15:02
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    @Servy it looks like with link only answers moderator needs to always read the question if they are serious about handing it per "another castle" guidance - because this is the only way to tell whether flag is valid or not. So, this is the kind of NAA that requires reading the question
    – gnat
    Commented Oct 19, 2016 at 15:25

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