Answers in comments

Question

There are quite a large number of Meta.ELU questions about answers in comments, but none which definitively settles community opinion, mainly because they are rather old now, but also because they don't canvass votes on all possibilities (and thus generally only gain answer/opinion votes from users who are particularly exercised).

Currently, one user is systematically flagging answers in comments despite there being no clear consensus. As these are custom flags, they fall to moderators to deal with and there are currently over 60 flags outstanding.

Since there is no clear consensus, it would be better to use the standard "No longer required" flag, because if other users think the same way then the comment will be deleted by the system (once the minimum number of flags has been reached).

Without a clear consensus reached in Meta.ELU, moderators may well simply decline these custom flags as there is no reason for moderator action. I'd like to present the opportunity for even the un-exercised to express that opinion by voting for the status quo if that's OK with them.

So: what should the site's attitude be to answers in comments? Answers on a postcard in the answer box, please. I've come up with a few options which you can vote on; feel free to add more.

The options are not necessarily mutually exclusive, so you can vote up more than one.

Answer 1

Option 3: Answers may be made in comments where the question is off-topic but we still wish to help the asker.

This seems to be standard practice; we try to be helpful.

Answer 2

Option 6: Partial answers may appear in comments and may be used by anyone who wishes to post a complete answer, with the understanding that mods may still delete the comments at a whim, without notice.

This represents the least overhead in terms of 'extra rules everyone must know' because it pretty much stays true to the way Stack Exchange has been set up. The fewer 'special cases' to remember, the easier to follow the rules.

• Commenters may contribute as comments anything less than whatever they deem to be a full answer (see below for more on this).
• The community may use anything from comments in their own answers or wikis, preferably with attribution.
• Everyone may 'vote' on comment deletion via the no longer needed flag (to ease the load on moderators, don't use a custom flag for this) - this is the comment section's equivalent of a down/close vote.
• Moderators are free to do as they wish regarding comments. There is no obligation to remove comments or to preserve them. They can push comments to chat, delete them, create wikis, create answers, or leave them alone.

Permitting partial answers in comments straddles the following help page guidelines, going beyond the first but stopping short of the second.

• (DO) Add relevant but minor or transient information to a post (e.g. a link to a related question, or an alert to the author that the question has been updated)
• (DON'T) Answering a question or providing an alternate solution to an existing answer; instead, post an actual answer (or edit to expand an existing one)

It upholds the primary purpose of comments:

Comments are temporary "Post-It" notes left on a question or answer.

This option remains true to the intended nature of comments, promotes a friendly EL&U culture and strikes a good balance between the desire to be helpful and the desire to maintain a good database, with answers held to a high standard. As a bonus, encouraging the community to participate in comment moderation frees diamond mods to handle less routine matters.

Answer 3

I hope it will be helpful if I list the main problems with comment answers. Any proposed solution can be evaluated against them to see how it holds up.

Someone has helpfully numbered these problems for easy reference. The numbering is just for reference and does not imply an order of importance.

1. Comment answers cannot be community edited or peer reviewed. They cannot be improved, they cannot be accepted. They can be upvoted, but that does not rank them, and they cannot be downvoted. Without this feedback, askers frequently are satisfied by the first comment answer they receive, and abandon the question, not that knowing the answer they got is actually controversial.

2. To make matters worse, comment answers frequently lack substantiation or sourcing, that is, they are generally written to a lower standard of quality.

3. Despite the above, comment answers get an undeserved privileged position on the page above even the best answers. This subverts the peer review process – it places unreviewed comment answers above the highest reviewed answers.

4. Comment answers discourage actual answers. I have seen numerous comments by people who refuse to repost comments as answers because it would feel too much like rep farming or plagiarism.

5. There is no simple mechanism for converting comments to answers. This makes work for reviewers.

6. Questions with comment answers clog the Unanswered queue. Accepting an answer is how that queue gets cleared, and as I pointed out many askers just take away the first comment answer they get and abandon the question.

7. The system presents new questions to users who have previously answered similar questions, based on their past answers. This feature is subverted when the users aren't posting actual answers.

8. Last but not least, comment answers are a frequent practice of some high-rep users, despite repeated calls to end the practice by SE employees and community managers, which creates an impression that the regulars in our community flaunt the rules.

Answer 4

I upvoted Andrew Leach's "Option 3" answer, but I wanted to go into more detail about the comment-deletion policy that I think makes the most sense.

I think there is a difference between the "temporary Post-It" ideal of what comments on Stack Exchange sites should be and how they actually function in practice, and I don't see as much value in trying to stick to the ideal as I see in allowing certain unofficial uses of comments that seem useful.

Another issue is that it's not necessarily a good idea for the moderators to take action just because something on the site isn't being used the way it theoretically should be. Theoretically, question closure is supposed to be a temporary state [except for duplicate questions]--but that doesn't mean that moderators should be expected to delete or reopen at a whim any old closed question that is flagged by a user.

I'm not entirely clear about what counts as "answering in the comments", and for this reason, I'm not in favor of the more absolute policies against this practice. Sometimes, people will posts links (either to other SE posts or to external resources) and a bit of explanation of why the link is relevant in a comment: I think these can be useful, and therefore should not be deleted, but don't necessarily meet the criteria for a full answer (or sometimes, if the external resource is a dictionary, the question may be off-topic, and in that case making an answer post makes it harder for the question to be closed and eventually deleted). I have posted comments like this myself.

I think comments like this that contain a link along with some explanation of why the link is relevant are usually valuable and I would not be in favor of moderators deleting them as a general policy. To give an example, here are two comments that were posted by Edwin Ashworth beneath a question, In terms of <single> or <plural> noun? How to tell?:

• I think this post comes close to being a duplicate. But your example seems really to be about the non-count / count usages of 'structure' (and the like); you could equally well consider 'When talking about structure/structures ...'. – Edwin Ashworth 2018-04-01 14:52:34Z

• ...your question is really about the ways structure/s are used, not about what people use after 'in terms of' (or 'when talking about'). / ODO gives helpful examples of abstract and concrete usages, going some way to differentiate count and mass usages. – Edwin Ashworth 2018-04-02 10:09:40Z

I think helpful information would be lost if these comments were deleted.

I also think that it is not very helpful to delete comments beneath closed questions. If a question is closed, then of course the author of the comment has no way to make an actual answer post. The closed status also indicates that the question should either be deleted (in which case the comments will automatically be deleted along with it) or improved and eventually reopened (and the comment might contain information that could help with efforts to improve the question).

In cases where an open question has unsourced comments that seem to try to answer the question, I would support a moderator (or any other user) re-posting the comment as an answer. Tchrist has done this with many of John Lawler's comments; for example:

In a comment, John Lawler wrote:

The meaning of grow that some might call a 'copula' is the sense of "growing to become" as in She grew tired. This is not the sense of grow in Babies grow quickly.

("Babies grow very quickly." In this sentence is "grow" a copula or a lexical verb?)

I definitely think this is better than just deleting a comment like this without warning.

So, to summarize, I would be in favor of moderators rejecting flags to delete:

• comments that consist of some explanation along with a link to a related post or external resource

• comments beneath closed questions

For comments posted beneath open questions that don't contain links or point to external references, I would be against moderators deleting them without any other action, but I think it may be worthwhile to post an answer based on the comment. However, it seems inefficient to use a flag to ask a moderator to do this, since any user can post an answer based on a comment. So I think the best course of action for someone who is irritated by the existence of such comments would be to post an answer based on the comment, and then flag the comment for deletion (I suppose the "no longer needed" flag would technically be accurate, but I'm not sure how well it would work in practice. My understanding is that comments that have been flagged with this reason are just presented to moderators without any context, so the moderator viewing such a flag might not have any idea that an answer based on the comment has been posted. I have sometimes used custom flags rather than the "no longer needed" flag so that I can give an explanation of why the comment is obsolete; in at least one case, after I raised a "no longer needed" flag that was declined I raised a custom flag that resulted in the deletion of the comment.) Or rather than converting the comment to an answer themselves, some people might prefer to first ask the author of the original answer-comment to post it as an answer.

Answer 5

Here is one (admittedly contrived, legalistic) argument that can be used to excuse the practice of answering some questions in comments.

Suppose that somebody, in good faith, asks a reasonable question concerning English language and usage (broadly understood), but the question, interpreted in the most obvious way, still does not belong to this site. The questioner seems to be a nice person who, by accident, walked into a wrong room, and so doesn’t deserve to be treated dismissively. One could then write something like this:

Your question, taken at face value, could be answered in the following way: . . . . Is this all that you have in mind? If it is, then the question is off-topic on this site, and will be closed. If there is something else that you are looking for, then please edit the question to clarify what that is.

Nobody could possibly object to this being posted as a comment: it is a request for clarification, and seeking clarification is the primary purpose of comments in the Stack Exchange framework. However, writing all this out many times over would be quite tedious, and would make the comments even more cluttered. To avoid that, one may choose to abbreviate a comment of this kind to just what is represented by the ellipsis here, that is a provisional answer to the question, but with the understanding that a request for clarification, along the lines that are explicated here, is still implied.

I am not sure how many of the answers currently posted as comments can plausibly be regarded as such implied requests for clarification, but in so far as at least some can, it can be argued that so posting them is not inconsistent with agreeing that it is, as a matter of general principle, undesirable to post answers as comments.

Answer 6

Option 2: Answers which appear in comments should be "converted" to answers, either by being a CW post or encouraging the commenter to make an answer of their comment.

If we encourage the commenter to make an answer, there would need to be a time limit for that to happen, after which it's fair game for someone else to make an answer of it. And if the comment is actually a good answer, there's really no reason why it should be a CW answer, either.

Answer 7

The question asks:

So: what should the site’s attitude be to answers in comments?

I think that “the site’s attitude” is of no consequence if it is contrary to Stack Exchange policy on this matter, as I have explained previously.

Let us be clear. There are certain rules that are within the jurisdiction of individual StackExchange sites — for example what subjects are off topic — and certain which are outside that jurisdiction as integral to the StackExchange model. The following message, which appears in the comment box of every StackExchange site, refers to a general policy which is outside the jurisdiction of the moderators of this site:

“Use comments to ask for more information or suggest improvements. Avoid answering questions in comments.”

Users who do not understand how this is integral to the Stack Exchange model are recommended to view the following video by one of the founders of Stack Exchange. If you don’t like this model, you should set up your own site or go elsewhere.

I have previously been admonished for commenting on ‘comments in answers’, and asked to flag such comments to the moderators instead. This I have been doing, so I may well be the user mentioned in the question. I have had no way of knowing which of the moderators have been disregarding flags that I have raised, but have been encouraged recently that at least one moderator — @MetaEd — has been responding to them according to the clear rules. However, I am now disturbed by what appears to be the attitude of the moderator who made this post, and, as I have stated in a comment to the question, I think that any disregard of these rules by the moderators would constitute abuse of this site.

Answer 8

Option 1. We allow answers to remain in comments.

This is the de-facto status quo.

Note that this is likely to happen for old comments anyway, unless standard flags are used so the community can clear up comments-as-answers.

Answer 9

Option 4: No answers should appear in comments AT ALL and they should ALL be deleted with extreme prejudice.

This is the most draconian policy. If this ends up as the winner then it will absolutely license the community to use the "No longer required" flag and self-police answers-in-comments.

Answer 10

Option X: Require some significantly higher qualifications to comment on questions. Something like >1000 rep, and a particular badge (say, Commenter) that requires passing a little course and test that demonstrates that you do understand what comments are for, and what they are not for.