I'd like to delete my comments here on EL&U and leave my answers pristine as I go through them to make sure that I still agree with what I wrote here 2 years or so ago.
Is there a way to delete all my comments here?
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Don't leave us! Stay!! Am I over-reacting?– Mari-Lou ACommented Jan 15, 2018 at 22:21
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1@Mari-LouA I'm not going, just reducing my input! :)– Araucaria - HimCommented Jan 15, 2018 at 22:21
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@Mari-LouA It's nice to be appreciated in my second conditional leaving world ;) ...– Araucaria - HimCommented Jan 15, 2018 at 22:24
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1english.stackexchange.com/users/76472/… I think you have to go through them one by one. I'm not sure there is a way to delete every comment, unless you employ a script of some sorts. You're not going, are you? Because I will be very upset.– Mari-Lou ACommented Jan 15, 2018 at 23:20
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This could be automated with the Stack Exchange API. I'm not familiar enough with it to help you, but it sounds like a bad idea anyway because you wouldn't be able to decide which ones to keep.– Laurel ModCommented Jan 16, 2018 at 4:24
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1@user159691 Your guess is wildly off the mark.– Araucaria - HimCommented Jan 16, 2018 at 12:25
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1@user159691 To be fair, the sort of input put into the comments on stack exchange is never really supposed to be permanent. We instead aim to have all information that should be permanently archived in the question itself, or the answers to it, with the comments primarily playing an advisory role for posters to improve their other posts. If the comments haven't been acted upon already, then it could be argued that they outlived their usefulness.– TonepoetCommented Jan 16, 2018 at 14:53
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1The technical answer seems to be no, you can't kill all your comments in one fell swoop. And of course it is tedious to kill them one by one. However, I am curious as to why you are willing to review all your answers and think about them to make sure you still agree with them, and not willing to scan and cull your comments. I would have thought the two tasks were of the same order of magnitude -- much more thought individually on fewer answers; much less thought individually on more comments.– ab2Commented Jan 17, 2018 at 2:36
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2 Answers
For regular users there is no special tool to remove all comments. You'll have to go thru them all one by one. Or maybe there's some user script that can help simplify matters.
In case removal of your comments makes some of the rest of the comment threads end up obsolete, flag them for removal as well.
I hope you don't delete the ones that are useful for future visitors.
NVZ is the expert of meta, so I expect the system doesn't allow comment deletion en masse, though a software expert might be able to devise a special purpose script to serve your purpose.
May I only add that there seems to be a general consensus we should not delete our output all together but only those items that need deletion: in short, the user has discretion to delete individual comments one at a time, and can indeed manually delete thousands of comments one by one in a laborious manner, but your body of work contributed one question/ answer/ comment at a time is considered valuable by the community.
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That is the way it is if one becomes a Nexpert @NVZ. Commented Jan 16, 2018 at 20:26