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Courtesy link: https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/140390/discussion-on-question-by-arunabh-bhattacharya-why-are-just-and-justice-writ

There have been a long list of comments on one of my questions I asked. However, 3 months later, the comments have been moved to chat, and the comments are currently locked for 10 years. What exactly in going on with the string of comments? The same think happened with a question I asked in 2020.

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I moved them to chat because we don't want to encourage commenting. There were too many comments there. And I locked it against further comments for the next decade so that it doesn't get any more added to it, either.

Nothing is gone. And comments are not precious. They are subject to complete deletion at any point. Those are saved, but in chat where they belong, not dirtying up the question with conversation threads, which goes against the SE model.

If comments are important, edit your post and put their content there where they belong. Chat is for chattiness, not Q&A.

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    What event triggered this rather drastic solution? I'm referring to the locking of comments for 10 years. I mean, in three months the question has only attracted 411 views. Was there a recent flurry of comments? Were you responding to someone's flag? Why were the comments suddenly moved, when the last activity occurred on August 7 2022?
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Nov 6, 2022 at 9:24
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    @Mari-LouA What happened was that I finally got back to dealing with an old “Too Many Comments” auto-flag from the system, a flag I’d previously deferred taking stronger action on. Mostly I was testing out locking comments for longer than a week yet shorter than forever, an experiment that proved successful.
    – tchrist Mod
    Commented Nov 6, 2022 at 16:56
  • But if there has been no activity on the post for months, doesn't that prove that it is unlikely to attract excessive further comments, and that no drastic measures are needed to prevent that?
    – jsw29
    Commented Nov 7, 2022 at 15:45
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    @jsw29 Deleting old comments is not a drastic measure. It's routine maintenance.
    – tchrist Mod
    Commented Nov 7, 2022 at 16:12
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    Deleting the comments that have become irrelevant is arguably routine, but blocking the comments for ten years (!) does seem to be a rather drastic measure. Although commenting on the Stack Exchange is an activity that is ancillary to answering, the ability to comment is an essential feature of the Stack Exchange architecture. There is a vast difference between imposing a short cooling-off period when the question has already attracted excessive commenting, and blocking all future commenting just because they might become excessive.
    – jsw29
    Commented Nov 7, 2022 at 18:08
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    @jsw29 Like I said, I was just trying out the locking configs. I unlocked it already.
    – tchrist Mod
    Commented Nov 7, 2022 at 22:48
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    @jsw29 — As comments are to ask for clarification or to provide information to the poster that may help him improve his question, removal after activity on the question (especially the poster's) has ceased seems perfectly reasonable to me.
    – David
    Commented Nov 16, 2022 at 11:12

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