Make comment flags less stupid

100% agree comment flags need updating. But the "regular user" in me is screaming that I'm going to be using that 'other' flag reason a lot more than those listed because (1) they don't cover the real-world problems I most want to flag, and (2) they're primarily describing the effect of these comments rather than identifying the problem I'm actually trying to resolve (a classic X-Y problem).

Okay, let's start with this premise…

"Comments" are a misnomer

We invite uninitiated users (not privy to our endless meta discussions) to "comment"... but bark at them when their comments don't fall under some very specific use cases. That's our fault (more on that another time). But let's at least make these 'flags' instructive rather than labeling these activities with blunt accusations that don't at all describe what any reasonable, non SE-regular person would expect — "I'm being noisy? rude? What a bunch of fargin iceholes."

We have an on-going problem of perception. Stack Exchange users pick up on this terminology (from our flags and close reasons) and pass it on verbatim as guidance. We say things like "this is noise" or "this is not constructive" directly to unsuspecting users who are having a completely normal interaction just about anywhere else. Yes, we know what these flags actually mean here, but this SE-speak is all very unwelcoming to just about everyone else looking on.

Flags that actually describe the problem

This is really rough and draft-y, but here's what I suggest for starters:

I am flagging this comment because...

◉ unwelcoming comments violate our 'be nice' policy
⭕ does not seek clarification nor improve the post
⭕ answer posted as a comment
⭕ comment no longer needed
⭕ other...

• Unwelcoming comments violate our 'be nice' policy

This includes the 'rude or offensive' scenario — but 99% of the time, I'm not necessarily flagging Nazi references or four-letter words. Typically it's just someone pandering to the crowd with off-putting quips like "Are you too lazy to read the manual?" ... sorry, but <poof> deleted. But as a flag-able offense, I'd be hard-pressed to outright accuse someone of being overtly rude or offensive. It's just a bad habit brought in from the broader Internet that we simply don't do here; but it does need to be flagged.

• Does not seek clarification nor improve the post

This covers 'too chatty' which is now part of 'noisy'. Being called noisy is an awfully obtuse accusation for someone who is sharing a bit of experience about the question (too chatty) or for someone who was offering a helpful suggestion which was later resolved (obsolete).

Comments are generally designed to ask for clarification or to make suggestions to improve the post. There are other use cases, but this flag generally covers all those tangents, quips, asides, conversations, and discussions that are outside what we traditionally consider a valid comment.

• Answer posted in comment

This one isn't even covered. New users sometimes mistakenly start typing their answers into the closest text box they can find. Other times, a user simply cannot be bothered to write up a proper answer, so they drop something half-baked into comment where it's not subject to the vetting and voting features that a proper 'answer' provides. Others feel their pseudo-answer is just a hint, or that they don't actually know except to say, "I think it has something to do with..." But generally speaking, answers should not be submitted as comments. If you find such comments useful, flagging is not compulsory. Flags are always vetted in some manner by users or moderators before being acted upon, so communities can decide for themselves what is useful or valid.

• Comment no longer needed

This covers 'obsolete' comments, but this flag was omitted entirely from the revised flag list. Unfortunately, very few people are going to realize that resolved issues are now being called "noisy."

As an aside, I really do hate that our local community moderators are spending ungodly amounts of time running around picking up scraps of paper here and there surrounding the city dump, but until we find a better way to clean up resolved comments, this is all we have; the obsolete flag.

[Note: I'm actually open to the suggestion that maybe we shouldn't be asking folks to 'flag' resolved comments at all. It's not that we shouldn't remove them if we have that ability, but this flag-investigate-delete-cleanup workflow (one. comment. at. a. time) BARRRRELY puts a dent into something that is essentially harmless but no longer needed. So for all the community resources we throw at this, the actual net benefit of removing this miniscule sampling is virtually zero. Think about it.]

I was going to post this as a separate feature request, but it seems to go fine here: How about keeping obsolete (or something similar) and inform the comment’s author about such a flag? If the author disagrees with the flag or fails to react to it within a certain time (e.g., 24 h), it is automatically converted to a noisy flag.

I have the following arguments for and against this:

• Compared to the current system, it shifts work from the moderators to the users and also reduces the work, as the author of a comment is usually more familiar with the situation and can decide more easily whether the flag is actually obsolete. In particular it does not create additional work.

• Compared to the suggested system, this may create more work, but this effect is alleviated by the aforementioned effect of familiarity as well as the fact that the author of a comment can unilaterally delete it.

• This reduces the chance that someone will not flag a comment as obsolete to avoid bothering the moderators, and may thus increase the number of obsolete flags. Whether this is a good or a bad thing can probably only be answered by experiment.

• If users constructively commented on a post, there is a good chance that they are interested in the topic or, e.g., they are just waiting for a clarification before answering. Thus, such flags often coincide with an event that the comment author wants to know about anyway or they would have been informed of anyway (also see the point after the next). This also partially addresses the prominent feature request for informing downvoters about edits.

• The most prominent exception to the above are arguably comments coming from reviewers. However, reviewers are performing moderating duties anyway and should thus be fine with a little additional workload from such flags.

• It eliminates the need for creating another comment to inform a commenter that their comment has been reacted to (and is now obsolete). With other words, one could simply flag a constructive comment to one’s own post as obsolete instead of writing something like:

  You are indeed correct about this information missing. I clarified this. Thank you.

  As the post author in such a situation, I am in the dilemma between

  • just flagging the original comment and thus risking that its author never becomes aware of my amendments.
  • creating yet another comment, and thus more noise, to inform the original comment’s author about the amendments, thus risking that both comments remain (because the original comment’s author won’t delete a comment with a reply) or that I forget to delete my comment in time.

  What I am suggesting avoids this dilemma and in particular the reason to make comments for the sole purpose of notifying other commentors about something. Something similar also applies to cleaning up comments after a longer discussion.

• Most comments become obsolete, because they have been useful. Therefore it is usually slightly rewarding, if this happens: One has helped to make the Internet a slightly better place.

• The only reason I can imagine why an author would refuse to delete an actually obsolete comment is that they are aiming for the Pundit badge. This could be countered by having deleted comments (or only comments deleted as obsolete) count towards this badge – though this probably requires a disproportionate amount of work.

• This avoids the problem of having negative words such as noisy, unconstructive or similar assigned to good comments.

One might also consider having this feature appear under a guise other than flags, to avoid the negative connotation that comes with it. For example, users usually do not want to read something starting with Your post has been flagged and arguably prefer something along the lines of:

Your comment has been considered to be obsolete by another user. If you can verify this, please delete your comment.

As a side effect, this may also reduce the disproportionate effect of comments on flagging badges and statistics.

^{Some arguments are adapted from SevenSidedDie’s answer.}

Keep the "obsolete" flag reason, with notification to the comment owner

I second the proposal by Wrzlprmft to retain and improve the obsolete flag. From a user perspective, that I think will further streamline this for mods as well as easily add utility for users.

^{(Originally a duplicate due to missing the other answer proposing this. Kept because we both felt this had unique value.)}

The obsolete flag reason should be kept, and made to add a notification to comment-owner's supercollider as well as put into the "noisy" flag bin for moderators (either immediately, or after a timeout of owner inaction). If the comment owner self-deletes, that clears the flag as useful.

Very often I will wrap up an exchange of comments with someone, and it's obvious that we are about to agree that we're done. What ends up happening then is that I can self-delete my now-obsolete comments, but I can only notify the other user that it's time to self-delete by creating a new comment. Then they self-delete, and my comment is left hanging around, obsolete, and I won't notice unless I check back. I often fix this by not commenting, and instead just flagging their comments as obsolete, since that's what the flag is for.

I often wish that I could short-cut the whole back-and-forth cleanup by notifying them directly that their comments are ready for cleanup, and I wish the current obsolete flag did that.

I use "obsolete" all the time in in this way, and I don't like the extra work it creates for mods. I don't like that the flags send the message to the wrong person in the first place. I would much prefer that I could notify the other person that its time to self-delete their comments and, if they get the notification promptly, save the mods some work. For that reason, I think "obsolete" is a useful distinction to keep, if we could add that functionality.

Pros:

• Lets users take care of more flag-clearing load without having to implement anything but a new type of notification
• Retains the clear call to action of the obsolete flag reason in the popup, avoiding needing to educate users how and when a useful comment can become noisy
• Reduces the chance that someone will not flag an obsolete comment so as to avoid bothering the mods, and may actually increase obsolete flagging behaviour

Cons:

• Requires developer time to add a new notification type

Maybe you have this planned, but I suggest including a summary description on the comment flag popup to describe the new options.

With Q&A flags, their descriptions can be a bit confusing/misleading, many posts about it etc, and new comment flag options will bring confusion, even if just from "a change" of what people are used to.

For example, Doorknobs comment "what about obsolete comments which are not exactly noise", which is a valid a point and many will have the same thought, as well as other confusions.

I agree "noisy" replaces "obsolete", but as "noisy" also replaces "not constructive" and "too chatty" it would be useful to make this clear under the flag options, so people don't get confused with the change and missing options they were used to.

A (basic/crude) example:

One aspect that is extremely annoying as a user when trying to moderate comments is that I have to do this for each comment individually. This inevitably means that I'll run into rate limits, and makes it pretty much impossible to flag more than 2-3 comments if you value your sanity. As a moderator, it's much easier. I click delete on every comment that should vanish, and it happens immediately. Or I nuke all comments and undelete the few that are worth saving.

This is mostly an issue with noisy or obsolete comments, there are quite often a whole bunch of them and not just a single one. A single noisy comment is also not really that big a deal, an entire noisy and pointless discussion is far more distracting. As a user I don't even bother flagging them, I either leave it be or just flag the parent post.

If the idea is to enable the community to handle certain comments by itself, I think we need the ability to act on multiple comments more easily.

I've been thinking about flags for a long time, and recently I turned my attention to comment flags. Out of sheer curiosity, I ran some numbers for the past year of comments flags across the network - to see how many helpful/declined flags we get in each flag type. In 2016, we had 354,440 comments flagged, of those 332,237 were marked helpful. The breakdown is:

+-------------------+-----------------+------------------+-------------+-----------+
|   Comment Flag    | # Helpful Flags | # Declined Flags | Total Flags | % Helpful |
+-------------------+-----------------+------------------+-------------+-----------+
| Obsolete          | 158,527         | 2,575            | 161,102     | 98.4      |
| Too Chatty        | 63,040          | 1,747            | 64,787      | 97.3      |
| Not Constructive  | 76,314          | 8,832            | 85,146      | 89.63     |
| Rude or Offensive | 21,180          | 4,835            | 26,015      | 81.41     |
| Other             | 13,176          | 4,174            | 7,350       | 75.94     |
+-------------------+-----------------+------------------+-------------+-----------+
| Total             | 332,237         | 22,163           | 54,400      | 93.75     |
+-------------------+-----------------+------------------+-------------+-----------+

Both 'Obsolete' and 'Too Chatty' have a higher helpful rate when compared to the other flag types, and when reading the help center about comment flags the guidance is very similar. In my experience, those flags are typically very easy to process, and involve the least amount of effort in deciding if it's accurate.

For the other 3 comment flag types, you typically need to spend a bit more time deciding if the flag is correct. But I'd also guess that the decline rates on 'Not Constructive', 'Rude/Offensive' or 'Other' flags is from those flags being used incorrectly (more on this later).

The reason I've been thinking about comment flags is because in August 2016, we implemented a new auto-flag for moderators to point out users who consistently have comments flagged as rude or not-constructive. In looking at how accurate these auto-flags are, I've come to the realization that they stink. It's not because the auto-flag is bad. It's because users are flagging comments with the wrong reasons, moderators are told to process comment flags quickly, and spend very little time thinking about comment flags. As a result, we have poor comment flaggers, with no correction of the poor flagging, which then leads to noisy auto-flags being thrown at the moderators to handle.

The current flag dialog is, well, a bit terrible. The options aren't very clear and there is zero guidance in the dialog.

I've seen comments like:

You're welcome, glad i could helps.

Updated with the latest spec.

Thank you very much

all flagged as Not Constructive, when really they should have been flagged as too chatty.

Our options to fix this are:

1. tell the moderators to spend more time on comment flags, and decline stuff flagged wrong to train the flaggers,
2. adjust the rude/not-constructive auto-flag trigger to minimize what is included,
3. or, revamp the comment flag options to try & capture what people are really flagging for

I chose option 3. Searching many Meta sites, you'll find posts about comment flags being declined, or confusion about what flag to use. Let's just make the dialog, and options a bit clearer.

I fully agree with minimizing or consolidating the flagging options, as suggested in the question. However, I'm concerned about the category 'Noisy'. Using 'noisy' to include things that have little value, aren't needed, or are unnecessary, sounds ok, but I'm unsure how many people will understand that definition of the word. I went in search of another word or phrase for it and got a lot of really good suggestions. I also like some of the suggestions by Robert, but I think they are getting too far into the weeds. The comment flag categories, in my opinion, should be easily recognizable to minimize any confusion.

I think we can consolidate the current options into 3 categories similar to your proposal but maybe alter the 'Noisy' option just slightly. I recommend the following:

Rude or Offensive

Keep this category as it falls in line with the Be Nice policy. When handling these moderators will be able to [Delete] or [Dismiss] from the flag queue and if necessary, they'd message a user with a suspension if required.

Irrelevant or Superfluous

I'm aware this is just quibble over a word, but I don't think 'Noisy' is as clear-cut of a name that you'd like. Irrelevant or Superfluous keep the spirit of your original suggestion by encompassing the no value, not needed, or even obsolete that we're replacing. I agree with your options available to handle these comments: [Move thread to chat and delete], [Delete] and [Dismiss].

Other

This should remain in the event a comment doesn't fit into any of the previous categories.

Besides adjusting the categories, I'd also suggest we add a bit of help to the users inside of the comment dialog box. This dialog should be updated to be similar to the post dialog - offering some guidance to the users. A very rough draft could be:

I think that by offering more guidance to the users and minimizing the number of categories, we might make comment flags a little less stupid. This would also allow the new auto-flag to solely use 'rude or offensive' flags as the indicator that moderators might need to address a problem user.

I'm open to leaving more categories if we don't want to reduce this to 3 flag comment types, but I think having some high-level buckets with guidance will help considerably.

I suggest combining elements of the answers by Robert and James. A flag should indicate why the comment should be removed, not the problem it causes, and that reason should be simple to understand and categorize. Reduce the number of options, and add a bit of explanation to each. Something like this:

I'm flagging because this comment is...

• Not nice. Users are expected to display basic courtesy and civility.
• An answer. Answers should be posted as answers, not comments, so the community can vote on them.
• Unnecessary. Comments are for requesting clarification or suggesting improvements. If they are off topic, unhelpful, chit-chat, have already been addressed, or without value, they can be removed.
• Other. Please add an explanation of what's wrong and we'll take a look at it.

Simple, easy to understand, and to the point. Regarding each item specifically...

• Not nice. One of the great things about the "be nice" policy is that it's simple. "Rude or offensive" is much less so, because those terms are more subjective and complex. I've dickered more than once over whether I should flag an unhelpful, brusque comment as "rude" or "not constructive". "Not nice" mirrors the simplicity of the guiding policy. While "not nice" is a weaker standard than "rude", my response to that is "comments are meant to be ephemeral". Even something "merely" sarcastic can easily turn off a new user who's struggling with learning a new way to communicate.
• An answer. Answers should be posted as answers, seriously. Answer-comments have been brought up as problematic many times on, for example, ELL. I cringe when I see a question with 0 answers because a knowledgeable user didn't bother to take the extra 30 seconds to type in a different box and add an extra sentence of explanation. My impression is that the biggest reason answers end up as comments instead of answers is because of rep. Either "this isn't good enough to deserve upvotes" or "this might be a terrible idea and I don't want downvotes". If it's incomplete, post a CW answer instead, or suggest it as an improvement on someone else's answer. If it's a half baked idea that sounds relevant but might not work, why are you giving such crappy advice?
• Unnecessary. Let's cut to the meat of the issue with most of the comment flag reasons. They exist because we like to keep things clear and on point. We remove X (comments, salutations, tag lines/signatures, etc.) where other places don't because it's unnecessary and just gets in the way of the Q&A at hand. Is there really a need to keep obsolete, not constructive and too chatty as separate reasons? The system already handles them the same way, and they are different flavors of the same undesirable: noise.

These reasons provide guidance by way of explanations of what we do and don't want to see as comments, rather than in comments. "I shouldn't make this type of comment" is much easier to grasp than "I shouldn't make a comment which has a substantial amount of this quality".

The question here also mentions thresholds. We get a huge volume of comments and several other answers here suggest that we should shift moderation of them to the community. I agree, and suggest a per-option threshold (except on other) for automatic deletion. Each type should be ignorant of the others. This keeps things simple and allows for appropriate automatic handling once the threshold is hit.

Tweak the baseline and contributing factors (e.g. "contains lmgtfy link") as you like, but this would save queue work. If you're worried about false positives or the like - a reasonable enough concern - make the thresholds high or flags age away like closevotes.

The more automation for comments, the better. Because they get made with such a high frequency, this is a great place to attempt to lower the moderation workload. Mad Scientist's point about being able to flag multiple comments at the same time is well made and gets an upvote from me. Again, comments are meant to be ephemeral, so users should get used to the idea of seeing comments disappear and be able to easily contribute to the clean up process. Currently comments hang around essentially forever, unless they have a serious problem or were made by a very tidy user. This automation need not be negative; for example, a comment with X "answer" flags and Y upvotes could be automatically converted to a CW answer.

What mean "noisy"?

Why is having four choices too many? It makes flagging simpler, if the flagger cannot choose between the four descriptions then there is a fifth venue available, other...

How long does it take to read these descriptions, how much "wasted" space does it occupy? I like the descriptors, they're written in plain English which anyone can understand. Remember, not everyone is an English native speaker, giving non-native speakers a range of choices is being helpful. Moreover, the term noisy may not be clear, if you have to provide a detailed definition of noisy and include "chatty"; "unconstructive" and "obsolete" you might as well keep the original options!

Asking someone whose level of English is basic to write the reason for flagging a comment could be off-putting and cause unnecessary headaches. But if I had to streamline the options, I would suggest merging "unconstructive" and "chatty" under one name: "unproductive".

I strongly agree that comment flags need a better mechanism, but what you propose isn't quite right. Your comment categories make sense from a philosophical perspective but not from a flagger's perspective or from a flag handler's perspective.

The first element in classifying comment flags are according to the expected action.

• Delete the comment.

Well, that was easy. Actually, not so easy — there are a few refinements I'll deal with later, because sometimes there is more to the story than deleting the comments. The rare cases where some comment-related moderation needs doing which doesn't involve deleting the comment can be handled by flags on the post.

Why the comment needs deleting is the next step in classifying comment flags. Not because the reason is important, but inasmuch as the reason determines who is most qualified to determine whether the comment should be deleted, and possibly take other action.

• Obsolete comments: many comments are perfectly legitimate, but lose their usefulness at some point. Being temporary notes is the whole purpose of comments, so ideally all comments would go through this stage. There are three main reasons why a comment would become obsolete:

  • The comment suggests an action, such as an edit, which has now been carried out. (“Didn't you mean ‘marital arts’ in paragraph 3?” — post now edited to read ‘marital arts’ instead of ‘martial arts’)
  • The comment suggests an action, but the commenter has changed their mind. (#1 in “Didn't you mean ‘marital arts’ in paragraph 3?” — “No, ‘martial arts’ is right.” — “Oh, yes, of course, you're right.”)
  • The comment is a reply to another comment, and no longer serves a purpose once it's been acknowledged or the other comment is gone. (#2 and #3 in “Didn't you mean ‘marital arts’ in paragraph 3?” — “No, ‘martial arts’ is right.” — “Oh, yes, of course, you're right.”)

  Obsolete comments are generally consensual and best validated by their author.

• Noisy (chatty, off-topic) comments that shouldn't have been there in the first place. These are a fundamentally different category from obsolete comments because determining the validity of noisy comments doesn't require looking at the history, and noisy comments, unlike obsolete comments, usually require an external eye.

  Noisy comments can be dealt with effectively by users participating in moderation, i.e. moderation of noisy comments can be a privilege granted by reputation (10k?).

  Sometimes the best thing to do with noisy comments is to move them to a chat room. Moderators (be they diamond or high-rep) should have appropriate tools to do so.

• Non-constructive/rude comments are comments that should never have been posted. Unlike comments that are merely noisy, such comments often indicate that something bad is going on. They should be deleted outright, but might warrant additional action, such as keeping an eye for flamewars that won't die, issuing an admonition to cool down, etc.

  Non-constructive comments need a ♦ moderator.

I think we can live with these three categories (which are the current categories except for lumping “rude or offensive” with “not constructive” — moderators can see the difference for themselves anyway). Rather than have an “other” category, we should add an optional text field which will be seen by the comment handler. The user interface should make it clear who will see the optional text.

Since the “non-constructive/rude” category is the only way to reach moderators, it should lump in a generic “needs moderator attention” case.

This comment is

• obsolete [Optional note for the poster]
• chatty or noisy
• rude, not constructive, or otherwise needs moderator attention [Optional note for moderators]

The most important aspect is something that many have suggested before me: obsolete comments should be notified to the comment author. This way, to merely acknowledge a comment, users could flag it instead of compounding the problem by adding a comment of their own.

If the handler of an obsolete flag ignores or disagrees with the flag, or if there is a dispute in handling noisy flags, the situation should of course be escalated to moderators.

I'm not sure whether obsolete flag should be inbox notifications. They're a bit secondary compared with replies. On the other hand, they're acknowledgements. I think they should be inbox notifications if the flagger is the target of the comment, I'm not sure if they should be in other cases.

I like the direction of working on comments, and see that seems to be a current theme in the refinement process at the moment. I don't really have any issues with the extra moderation tools for reviewing comments, the metric proposed (although I am not a mod), nor the proposed behaviors.

What I do slightly take issue with is the "Noisy" word itself. I feel like noisy replaces "too chatty" really well as a word, but then is expected to also implicitly cover "obsolete" and "not constructive". In my opinion, "too chatty", "obsolete", and even "Noisy" types of comments are all "not constructive" comments. I believe it may also be hard for certain users to make the connection between "noisy" and the signal-to-noise paradigm. Rather, it is possible they make a connection to their own interpretation of what "noisy" is.

So can we please keep the term "not constructive" in place of "Noisy"? I think the path and behavior options for it are fine, but from a language barrier and understanding standpoint "not constructive" seems to be a better fit. The new description even still fits, "Use this flag for comments that offer nothing of value to either the author of the post or to future readers."

No longer needed

This comment is obsolete, chatty or otherwise unnecessary; it can offer no future benefit to either the author or other readers.

Before this wording is cast in stone:

The title No longer needed suggests that this flag is only to be used on content that was needed at some point in time. Going by the detailed explanation and experience, this is not the intention of the flag. To avoid this unnecessary confusion, I suggest to change the title to something like “Not needed (anymore)”.

This is still too ambitious; let's face it, folks need to be dying in the streets before this sort of omnibus plan would ever go anywhere. No one agrees on what comments are good for, much less when they should be deleted - so trying to revamp the flagging system is doomed to failure without tackling at least one of those problems first.

Declining this in favor of two smaller, more focused proposals:

1. Drop "not constructive", combine "noisy", reword "rude" and "other" comment flags
2. Drop "noisy" comment flags from the moderator queue unless an answer has 5 or more comments