[dang]

Recent software changes. The system used to say [flagged] only when the story was both heavily flagged and dead (closed to new comments). Now it says [flagged] if the story is heavily flagged, dead or not. Flagged-but-not-dead was the case here. That's why you didn't see a 'vouch' link, btw; there's no need to vouch for posts that aren't dead, since the purpose of vouching is to unkill them.

The reason we did this: stories that have a lot of flags but also a lot of comments don't get automatically killed by the software. This led to confusion and a lot of "why is this post not on the front page" questions. Displaying [flagged] in the title in such cases should answer, and thus preempt, most such questions. Plus HN users like it when they get more information, which this is.

Similarly, we're now displaying [dupe] on stories that are marked as duplicates but not dead.