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What is the purpose of comments?
I suppose my question is twofold (and is about the Q&A category only).
- What purpose are comments meant to serve?
- Should we have them at all?
The former question is one of information. What is their purpose? Or is that still being worked out?
The reason I ask the latter question is as follows. In my experience at MY, the comment area all too frequently becomes a dumping ground for whatever people wish to post and not risk being treated as an answer. (There, comments can be deleted only my moderators unless they're offensive, whereas answers can be deleted by others, too, if they've a net negative score. Also, comments can't be downvoted, which protects them from looking bad.) That's individual comments. And then comment threads, too, get long and off-topic, even if no one topic is of the type described above. Here, it can be even worse, since (as far as I can tell) comments cannot be flagged for moderator attention or deleted by non-moderators. They can't be upvoted either (which is probably a net good thing, but also means that the worse comments can't fade into the background).
2 answers
Comments are meant for requesting more information or clarification, pointing out issues to be addressed in an edit, and other things that lead to improving the post they're attached to. As we've seen on pretty much any web site that enables comments, though, what designers intend and what users actually do can vary.
Here is what we wrote in the functional specification for 1.0 (which we have not yet reached):
Questions and answers can have comments.1
Comments are threaded. There is a way to see what a reply is a reply to, and there is a way to reply to an existing comment.
A maximum of TBD number of comments is shown by default. If there are too many comments to show, priority is given to comments that begin threads (with an indicator that there are more, e.g. "(N replies)" after the comment text).
Comments support a subset of CommonMark to be specified. (Basic text formatting yes, tables and embedded images no...)
Comment use cases (includes muting notifications on your post/thread and archiving threads)
Comments will be flaggable but that's not implemented yet. For now you can flag the post and describe the problem. Sorry, I know that's not ideal.
We don't have plans to support voting on comments. If we have upvotes then we also need downvotes, and that leads to a cluttered interface when you think about the sizes of comments compared to the sizes of (votable) posts. On SE, comment voting was meant to help people find key points in a vast sea of comments; we think that collapsing comment threads will address that need. If it doesn't we'll look at it again; (non-)voting on comments isn't carved in stone, but we'd like to see the need before deciding to do it. We don't want comments to become mini-posts of their own.
By the way, because we'll have threaded comments we can also group comments. I envision all comments attached to close votes to be grouped in one thread for easy review. (In the designs I've been working with, all close reasons can accept comments; you'll get the textbox right there alongside the choice of reasons.)
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This text predated the introduction of articles. They get comments too. ↩
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Here, it can be even worse, since (as far as I can tell) comments cannot be flagged for moderator attention
True; specifically flagging comments doesn't seem to have been implemented yet (and I don't know whether or not it's on the roadmap, though I would expect we get something like it eventually).
However, as a workaround, you can always flag the post the comment is on, and specify that you want to bring a specific comment to attention for whatever reason.
For example: "The comment left by aCVn on May 32nd 25:18 UTC has been incorporated into the post and is now obsolete"
Keep it short and specific, and such a flag is easy for a moderator to deal with.
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