I've three related questions:
- If I believe a comment is essentially a duplicate of an earlier one, what is the proper etiquette, if any? I assume it's better to up vote a comment I agree with, rather than restate.
- If a duplicate comment is clutter, shouldn't we have an option to flag it as "duplicate"? Or is it so rare as to not require a special button?
- If we ever change our minds after flagging a comment, shouldn't we have an "undo flag" option? It could save the higher-ups some work.
A true story that motivated the issue:
While studying Susan's answer to Can I say "take effort"? I thought Wayne's comment was repeated, in essence, by Andrew, 4 hours or 2 comments, later. In a moment of temporary hyper-criticism, I flagged Andrew's comment as "obsolete". What I really wanted was "redundant" (or to use the language of question flagging, "duplicate"). What I should have done was flag it as "other..." and then explained my true feelings. Then, after being beset by feelings of remorse, I tried to unflag that which I had flagged.
Now, I can effectively undo an up- or down-vote to a question or answer by re-upvoting or re-downvoting it. (I don't know if I can unflag a Q or A; I didn't understand the answer given to Feature request: unflag.) However, an already-flagged comment is unflaggable! (Or is it unreflaggable? I'm agitated now, though normally unflappable.)
Especially embarrassing for me is that now I realize that Andrew was providing a counterpoint to Wayne's comment and there was no duplication. I'm so weighed down by remorse and embarrassment that I'm going to self-flag, flag and reflag myself vigorously until my flesh is raw.
