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My mouse gets half its wear on any given day from flagging comment-answers here. It's a veritable plague. Lately I've seen across-the-board rejection on flags on certain questions.

Here's an example: Will a 4", 100CFM bathroom exhaust fan work with 3" exhaust duct?

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In this case the flag was applied to the third comment, which is clearly an answer and not a request for clarification or other valid comment:

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On other SE networks this kind of thing is cleaned up more assertively. I understand that we're a unique network in some respects, but there's really no excuse for the vast amount of comment-answers that are tolerated and left to languish as thread-moss.

Am I wrong?

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  • ... ... ... Yes.
    – Mazura
    Commented Jan 8 at 18:51

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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Many times when I evaluate whether a comment delete request should be honored I look at the value of the comment being there versus the value of taking it away. There are many instances where the value proposition is fuzzy and I will lean more toward declining the delete request.

Even though the comment may look like an answer there may be no strong reason to purge it like some contributors here seem to want to do.

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  • 1
    I agree with being conservative in judgement, but the strong reason, to my way of thinking, is that comment-answers not only clutter the site, but they circumvent the voting process completely. There's no means by which to rank them with the proper answers.
    – isherwood
    Commented Apr 10, 2023 at 21:17
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    I think that while what you are doing is pragmatic, it is also bad for the health of the site because it lowers the overall quality. By catering to people who misuse the site you're also repelling users who wouldn't or don't. I think you're striking the wrong balance.
    – nmr
    Commented Apr 27, 2023 at 15:35
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In this scenario, the time between the flags raised to delete the comments, and the comment asking to convert their messages into an answer was negative 7 minutes. I've got an answer on a similar meta question where I mention wanting to see the content elsewhere, or at least give the commenter an opportunity to migrate their comment, before I delete it.

Deleting the original comments means I would also have needed to delete yours asking that they convert them to an answer (since it no longer references a visible comment). The result is they would have no notification anymore, and they wouldn't have their original comment to convert to an answer, and the information is effectively lost. In these cases, I opt to give the commenter time to return to the site and respond, and there's no snooze option for the mods responding to these requests, only delete or decline.

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  • Having never been a mod, I ask out of total ignorance: Is there no way to leave the flag in the queue for now and come back to it in a few hours to see if action has been taken? As a community member, I know that if I hit the "skip" button on a review, I'll never see it again, but I can just close out of the review queue and it does (I believe) remain there. If nobody else reviews it, I'm fairly certain it will be there later. Of course, review queues are reasonably actively monitored here, so I'm not 100% sure of this.
    – FreeMan
    Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 14:49
  • There's no snooze option for the mods responding to these requests. We can leave it for another mod, but we can't take it out of the queue to be reviewed at a future time.
    – BMitch Mod
    Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 14:54
  • Too bad. For all of SE's flaws, they've got a lot of flaws. ;)
    – FreeMan
    Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 14:57
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Ideally, the moderators and possibly trusted users should have automation to turn questions into comments and comments into questions, especially on behalf of those who can't comment yet (not that I've ever understood that restriction except as a misguided part of the gameification system I've always disliked).

I'd do that manually, except that I can't do so without losing the original author credit (except by pasting "as @x said" into the text, which still gives me the point rather than them.) I already do some of the "this should have been an edit" cross copying for folks; automation would help there too.

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    There's the option of posting as Community, but I agree. Don't use @ when crediting users, btw. That's not what @ is for. Just link their username to their profile.
    – isherwood
    Commented Oct 12, 2023 at 18:07
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    Linking username to profile is more manual work and reduces likelihood of my making the effort. Automation needed.
    – keshlam
    Commented Oct 12, 2023 at 18:12
  • Sure, but the @ is not useful in an answer and is not part of a username. It takes about two seconds to copy the link on the username, double-click it in your answer and paste it into the link builder dialog.
    – isherwood
    Commented Oct 12, 2023 at 18:56
  • I have removed "answer in the question" or "answer in the comment" - particularly when posted by the OP and made a Community answer out of it. Doesn't take too much effort. I usually will note in the answer something like "As posted by the OP in a comment:" then quote. Could work the same for "random user comment" even without a link to the user name, just type the user name in.
    – FreeMan
    Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 14:52
  • Not unreasonable. Not something I always comfortable doing. Shrug?
    – keshlam
    Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 14:55

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