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When I first encountered this question, it seemed like the ordinary struggles of a non-English speaker learning the language, so I flagged it to be migrated to ELL.

As the original poster's comments rolled in, it became clear that wasn't the case: they neglected to put an important condition into the question, a condition that substantially changed what they were asking.

I wanted to change my flag from "migrate to ELL" to "too broad". Both are sub-flags of "should be closed". It wasn't possible to click on "Should be closed" to get to its sub-flags; that option was was disabled. I retracted the flag, but found that once you'd done that you couldn't re-flag with that reason (some of the other flags were still available).

Is there a way to change the sub-category of a flag? If you can't currently do that, would it be possible to add that functionality?

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Reset to default
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You cannot change the reason given on a close vote. You can retract the vote if you choose Close a second time, but you cannot then re-vote to close until the earlier vote expires per the aging algorithm.

If there is a "right" reason a question should be closed, and you accidentally choose the "wrong" one, I would not be overly concerned. The reason for the closure that is displayed is based on whichever receives the most votes, and I believe so long as others choose too broad, it would be closed as such.

That said, if you are concerned that others will pile on and result in a bad migration, I'd simply retract the vote, and hope that other active reviewers or a moderator close it without the need for your vote.

It seems that flags can be retracted as well now.

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  • Hmm. I had a sentence in there about retracting the flag and being unable to re-flag but somehow it's gone now. I'll edit it back in.
    – Spencer
    Apr 19, 2017 at 19:20
  • @Spencer Once you flag something, that's the only flag you can submit regarding it. Likewise, once you retract your original flag, you cannot re-flag it. That's just how it is. If you flag something that ends up being edited and the flag is no longer relevant, you just gotta retract and move on, unfortunately. I'm not exactly sure why it is that way, so maybe a mod can explain.
    – Hank
    Apr 20, 2017 at 13:40
  • @Hank thus the feature-request tag.
    – Spencer
    Apr 20, 2017 at 14:16
  • @Spencer I'm aware you added that tag. My comments referred to the other part of your question.
    – Hank
    Apr 20, 2017 at 14:18
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    @Hank It's like that with close flags because they mimic actual close votes. A close vote (from a 3000-rep user) can be retracted, but not then re-cast; nor can a vote be altered once it's made. I suppose amending a close vote [rather than retracting and re-casting] might be acceptable; there may be a question on Meta Stack Exchange about that.
    – Andrew Leach Mod
    Apr 21, 2017 at 8:29
  • I voted to close something today for lack of research, but upon reflection, migrate to ELL would have been better. Unfortunately, no can do. :(
    – Davo
    Aug 24, 2017 at 13:20

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