Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Meta

Welcome to the Judaism community on Codidact!

Will you help us build our community of learners? Drop into our study hall, ask questions, help others with answers to their questions, share a d'var torah if you're so inclined, invite your friends, and join us in building this community together. Not an ask-the-rabbi service, just people at all levels learning together.

What is the purpose of comments?

+2
−0

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).

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

1 comment thread

General comments (1 comment)

2 answers

+0
−0

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.

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.

0 comment threads

+0
−0

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.)

  1. This text predated the introduction of articles. They get comments too.

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.

0 comment threads

Sign up to answer this question »