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Comments on Notifying each other that a commented-on issue is resolved, to produce fewer comments rather than more
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Notifying each other that a commented-on issue is resolved, to produce fewer comments rather than more
I just made a comment on another Meta post because I wasn't sure whether something in someone else's answer was a typo, or if so what the correct wording should be. It turned out that my best guess was correct, and I got a comment in reply to that effect (along with the author editing the post).
I figured at this point that I should delete my own comment, as it has served its purpose. But now I see a problem, that applies generally.
Presumably, me deleting the comment doesn't send any kind of system message, so now the author's "thanks, you were right" comment is orphaned. I could flag that for removal, but it seems heavy-handed to involve moderators for something like that. On the other hand, commenting in order to convey that I deleted the first comment and that the whole thing can be cleaned up now, is... clearly counterproductive. I can imagine this getting out of hand in extreme cases, like the classic "no, you hang up" routine.
Is there a more streamlined way we could handle these kinds of situations?
(Also, just to make sure: will a comment thread disappear from the ordinary-user UI, if every comment is deleted from it?)
It is worth noting that we don't need to have the thread be deleted. Threads on Codidact can be locked and archived. Arc …
8mo ago
One advantage of threaded comments is that the exchange isn't in anybody's way. If User A posts, User B comments, User …
8mo ago
Go ahead and flag the whole comment thread as no longer needed. I'm a moderator on EE, and wouldn't mind receiving su …
8mo ago
The exchange that provoked this question, happened on one of my answers. I wrote the response to you, to acknowledge …
8mo ago
Suppose we have a post author A and a comment author B. Here's a simple proposal for addressing the problem. When B …
8mo ago
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One advantage of threaded comments is that the exchange isn't in anybody's way. If User A posts, User B comments, User A says "thanks, fixed", and nothing else happens, no harm done. If that's the entire thread, either of them could flag a comment and say that the entire thread is now obsolete.
Comment threads under a post are shown in order by last-update time, so newer threads will push the "dead" one down and eventually out of (default) view.
Comment noise isn't as much of a problem on Codidact as it is on Stack Exchange because comments aren't a single list of top-level comments under a post. Feel free to clean up, flag, or ignore stale threads. If there are a lot of comments or comment threads on a post and the obsolete ones are getting in the way, please flag to let someone know. Mostly we don't expect this to be a problem because of the way we designed comment threads.
1 comment thread