Are flags supposed to be automatically marked “helpful” when the community closes/deletes the flagged post?

Question

I recently asked a question on what happens to a flag when the post it refers to is deleted by the community.

It appears that the flag is deleted from the queue and ignored (as far as flag weight goes). Is this the intended behavior? After doing some research on meta.SO (here, here, and here), it seems that it's not. It looks like (except in a few cases) a flag should get marked "helpful" automatically when the community closes or deletes the flagged post. So why wasn't it in my case? Am I misunderstanding something?

Marking this as a bug for now.

Answer 1

There was a bug here; it was processing things that were "flagged for moderator attention" (i.e. bespoke messages), but it was not processing the spam/offensive flags. This is because back in the depths of time (before we explicitly tracked flag outcomes), such votes on deleted posts were ignored in the moderator-facing UIs. It looks this didn't get updated to explicitly process the outcomes when the community votes to delete a post.

This has been fixed in the code (and will be deployed next release, usually within a day), and I will try to apply the change retrospectively.