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I recently received an answer to one of my questions posted as a comment. I upvoted the comment and suggested that the commenter post it as an answer. Was it appropriate to upvote the comment? The content is good, but it was not posted correctly.

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Comment upvotes don't have much value; they don't award reputation, and there's only a single one-time badge that can be earned for posting comments that get upvoted. The only real effect they have is making them more likely to be shown when some comments get collapsed due to too many comments on the post or too many answers to the question.

With that in mind, it doesn't really matter if you upvote it. The upvote itself doesn't do much. However, I would urge you to flag the comment instead of (or in addition) to upvoting it; answers do not belong in comments and by right it should be removed. You can also add a comment encouraging the poster to post the comment as an actual answer, and inform them that answers posted as comments are likely to be removed without notice.

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    Just removing useful information is bad idea. Even SE staff post comments as answers in bug reports (usually when rejecting), and without it, we would never know what was going on.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented May 12, 2023 at 8:11
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    @ShadowTheSpringWizard But that's not an argument against what I believe is considered proper SE etiquette. In that case, a moderator can (and should?) convert the comment to a community answer.
    – Joachim
    Commented May 12, 2023 at 9:09
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    @Joachim I'm mainly explaining my downvote here, as the answer clearly encourage to flag in order to delete, not ask to make it into an answer. Mods have enough work, especially on bigger sites, and there are thousands of comment flags every day on SO. Though not ideal, it's "less worse" to just leave useful comments around, even if they shouldn't have been comments in the first place.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented May 12, 2023 at 10:57
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    on the point of flagging comments, there's a possibly indirectly related part in Tim Post's answer to "Is posting someone's comment as an answer okay?": "If we were honestly concerned about this, moderators would have the ability to convert comments into answers. That's not going to happen."
    – starball
    Commented May 13, 2023 at 0:16
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I don't see any problem with upvoting answers posted as comments. If there are a lot of comments, it can make it stick out more.

But we want answers in answer posts- not in comments. So you did good by pinging that commenter asking them to post an answer.

If they don't reply after a while, or if they refuse, and the comment really did answer the question, you can post the answer in their stead. (see also Is posting someone's comment as an answer okay?). If you feel bad about potentially getting rep for it, then tick the box that says "Community wiki" at the bottom right of the answer UI. If you choose to just quote verbatim (I'd encourage you to paraphrase and expand instead), make sure to follow the CC-BY-SA license, which you can do by following the instructions in /help/referencing.

I can understand "answers" in comments when they're partially a request for more detail. Ex. of the form "Is <X missing context> the case here? If so, do Y. Or is <W missing context> the case here? If so, do Z". I do that myself quite a bit. I don't want to write answers that guess. I don't think leaving ambiguous questions is particularly good for the ecosystem in the long term.

Also note that in cases like I just mentioned above, writing an answer isn't always the next step once the missing info is provided. It might be found that the question is a duplicate.

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