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Comments on Hide Deleted Comments
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Hide Deleted Comments
In places where I can see deleted comments (admin/moderator, possibly also comments I wrote myself and deleted (not sure if that's the case or not)), they should be secondary to the active comments. Specifically, I found a post where there have been many comments, and several of the older ones have been deleted. Because there are many comments, only the first 'n' are displayed when initially viewing the post. But because there are many deleted comments, I have to click for "more" in order to see the ones that are actually active and relevant.
I suggest one of the following:
-
Whenever there are deleted comments, show something like
3 Deleted Commentswith a button/link to display the details in-line. -
If there are more than 'n' comments such that not all comments are initially displayed, and there are any groups of 2 or more deleted comments within 'n', then display any deleted comments as
3 Deleted commentsetc. as noted above and count the notice of deleted comments as if it were 1 comment. Example, with n = 8:- 1 active
- 3 deleted
- 2 active
- 4 deleted
- 5 active
Current display: 1 active, 3 deleted, 2 active, 2 deleted, "more = 7"
Proposed display: 1 active, 1 deleted placeholder, 2 active, 1 deleted placeholder, 3 active, "more = 2"
Post
I, too, find that the deleted comments get in the way, but I'd propose a simpler structure. We mods and admins don't need to see the entire structure in an overview; we just need to know that there are deleted comments (and how many) and have a way to show them. I propose that there are three states:
- undeleted comments only (with this indicator), displayed as normal
- all undeleted comments (the normal user's view after clicking on "show N more comments")
- all comments including deleted ones
For people who can see deleted comments, I would add "(show N deleted)" after the comments header ("X comments"). Clicking that would go to state #3. Otherwise, clicking on the usual "show N more comments" link at the bottom would go to state #2.
I would put the clickable indicator for deleted comments at the top, so moderators are warned up front and only discover there are 17 more (deleted) comments after they see the parts of a flamewar that made it through.
Comments are due for an overhaul, including threading and archiving, which will lessen the current problem. Whatever we do for deleted comments now will have to be reworked then, so let's keep it simple.
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