What does flagging a post because it has more than 20 comments mean?

Question

I noticed that a post has been flagged, from the Community user I guess, because it had more than 20 comments.

What is the purpose of that flag, and what should be done in such cases?

Answer 1

High comment frequency can be an indication of a number of factors.

• Really big arguments. Not useful to the site. Someone needs to clean it up.
• Back-and-forth. Unless it's pertinent, often this is better on chat and best cleaned up.
• Multiple user extensive discussions. It may be still on-topic, or it could be sliding off-topic. The stuff should probably move to chat.
• A popular post that actually gets a lot of comments. May need some tiny pruning but not always.

It's simply a warning to moderators that "Something may be amiss". Like most of Community user's boilerplate flags, it's only going by bare metrics so it's not a guaranteed actionable element. As noted, none of the resolutions are much that a non-♦ can do much about other than add additional flags.

That can be useful, though. You can note in a flag about the particular instance, if you think it is something that should be investigated. Or, you can say Community's flag is invalid, if there's nothing important.