Post History

The exchange that provoked this question, happened on one of my answers. 

I wrote the response to you, to acknowledge your helpful comment, and to notify you that you were indeed right. In addition to pointing out the typo in my post, you also said you were unsure about what I really meant. As such, I wanted to give you a ping, so you'd be notified the issue was resolved. I then flagged your comment as "No longer needed", and expected you to do the same with mine once you had read it. 

Had you only pointed out the typo, and not also written that you were unsure about the meaning of my text, I would have just marked your comment as NLN, and omitted replying.

Currently, Codidact only has custom flagging reasons for comments; there should also be "spam", "rude/abusive" and "no longer needed" in addition to the custom moderator flags. This better tells the user the expected uses of comment flags, and for the case of NLN, that flags are not necessarily a harsh way to deal with content. This is the same way it works on SE. There's also the possibility that Codidact should explore another way of handling this matter. The proposed solution of this answer is merely a slight improvement over the SE way. It's not necessarily the best way, and I'm open to other ways of doing it.

It should be preferred to avoid moderator intervention for this simple matter. In addition, the volatile "thanks + elaboration" is sent to the feedback giver for a reason; it's preferable that this isn't purged before the recipient gets the chance to read it. (A "thanks" without elaboration is pointless, and shouldn't be posted in the first place).

One way to solve this, is to notify users once their comments are marked NLN. For this specific case, it would be clear from the revision history of the answer what the "elaboration" of the comment would have to be. This still requires that the user then manually deletes their own comment. Experienced users should have no issue with this, but new ones are likely to find this confusing.

Another way is to let users mark their comments as automatically deletable by NLN flags from a specific flagger, that being, the one they pinged, either explicitly, or implicitly. This would let a feedback receiver remove the feedback once acted upon, although it also allows them to misuse this ability to remove said feedback without acting on it. That may sometimes be a mild abuse, though in most cases, likely just due to a misunderstanding.