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Often people will leave in a comment e.g. "you might want to fix your ... typo", then the poster fixes it, but the comment remains on, referring to nothing, causing clutter.

It would be nice if there were a box to check "deletable by original poster" so after he fixes the typo, he can delete that comment.

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  • Or maybe just a "deletable" checkbox for any user of sufficient rep (probably the "access to moderator tools" threshold) to delete it as appropriate later. Maybe give a limit of a week or a month before they can. Too complicated isn't worth the effort, but a single checkbox ("[x] may be deleted later" seems short enough) could be simple enough to be useful.
    – user575
    Commented Aug 17, 2010 at 11:08

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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In such a case, you can:

a) reply to the comment using the @username syntax, which will make it appear in the user's inbox;
b) flag the comment as obsolete, which will result in its deletion if it gathers enough flags;
c) flag the post itself for moderator attention, asking the moderator to delete the comment.

Option B is what I think should happen in almost all cases, unless you have actually run out of comment flags. C should only be used in cases where there are a large number of now-obsolete comments and a moderator could simply wipe them all out.

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  • 2
    I use B often as A seems to often only make it worse (another comment to delete), but I get this impression that very few other people do B, making it less effective.
    – user575
    Commented Aug 17, 2010 at 11:13
  • I'd say flag as obsolete, not as noise. That's precisely what it is, after all.
    – TRiG
    Commented Nov 29, 2012 at 17:54
  • @TRiG: When I wrote this, there was no flag dialog for comments.
    – mmyers
    Commented Nov 29, 2012 at 18:46
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I'm in favor of leaving the comment, but perhaps graying or striking it out. I'm fairly new to the SE sites, and I'd like to see the wizard behind the curtain.

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