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Question: For an answer on a stack exchange site with say 8 comments, how can I / is it possible to import the comments into a chat room?

Background: I was helping with a question and made several comments before I saw the link to auto-import comments into a chat room. This was awesome by the way!! Note that the person who asked the question left a link to the chat room in a comment.

I wanted to make a similar chat room out of this question because I edited an answer which wasn't mine and added a paragraph. I wanted to chat with the answer's author @JonHopkins to say, 'hey feel free to remove my edit -- just wanted to add my $0.02' -- especially as the stack exchange engines said not to add an additional answer. HOWEVER, there was no link to auto-import the comments -- probably because I hadn't previously left one, but I'm not sure.

So I ask here, Stack Exchange Gurus, could a static link be added to auto-import a series of comments into a chat session?

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10
  • 41
    Is it possible to beg for this feature?
    – M. Tibbits
    Commented Jun 28, 2011 at 19:44
  • 3
    Point more people here, to vote. (I just added my vote.)
    – Paŭlo Ebermann
    Commented Jul 8, 2011 at 1:04
  • @Geo Btw, after the bounty is awarded the bounty note is not visible anywhere, even in /revisions. I'm certain of this.
    – Manishearth
    Commented Dec 28, 2012 at 21:52
  • @Manishearth ok, thx! I'll award this bounty, take a snapshot and open a question addressing this tomorrow (can't award fresh bounty for 24 hours).
    – Geo
    Commented Dec 28, 2012 at 21:59
  • 2
    I have created a chat discussion for this question here.
    – awe
    Commented Aug 19, 2013 at 10:30
  • 8
    Forcing comments to migrate to chat being restricted to moderators is fine, but I would really like a way to suggest that we take this to chat now, rather than waiting for the suggestion to pop up.
    – psusi
    Commented Apr 1, 2015 at 0:26
  • 1
    Having that possibility early on would have saved a bunch of posts from an overfloating comment queue we had to cleanup later. How often I wished for such a link and it wasn't there! 4 years, is there really no way or will? ;)
    – Izzy
    Commented Jul 28, 2015 at 9:05
  • @Izzy Try a bounty again, because the last active state is of 2 years ago, so SE team probably forgot it.
    – 286110
    Commented Jul 28, 2015 at 10:26
  • How about "Let's chat" without having to do with the question? Of course, no direct invite should be made available (Spam alert), rather, we should be able to tag and say "Let's chat", and then choose "would you like to import this to chat?" and choose, with or without. And others hould be able to request to join, if that's not possible already.
    – user308037
    Commented Oct 27, 2015 at 0:23
  • Related: meta.stackexchange.com/q/288572/162102
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Dec 25, 2016 at 1:48

5 Answers 5

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+50

So, is there any movement on this? I asked a similar question that was closed due to being a duplicate. People seem to want this so... will it happen?

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  • 8
    Same here. This seems to be needed.
    – Richard
    Commented Oct 7, 2011 at 15:31
  • @Richard: That one is request for a moderator tool, which is not quite the same as this one. I would rather have this as available to anyone (maybe limited by a rep limit).
    – awe
    Commented Aug 19, 2013 at 9:52
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+150

That isn't possible (yet) but it may be a good feature to think about adding in the future.

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  • 14
    OK, the "yet" was 4 years ago – and "the future" is now. Still impossible? Whom to beg, where to nag for it?
    – Izzy
    Commented Jul 28, 2015 at 9:06
13

This issue has been brought up twice recently, amusingly by mods from the same site:

I think the use case is a little bit different than this post, but since they keep getting closed as duplicates I will make my case here.

The feature we are looking for already exists, it seems to be just a matter of who has access to it. The migration of chat comments already happens if one of the commentors clicks the suggested link to do so. The point I was trying to suggest was that a moderator should be able to instigate this action before they scrub too-chatty comments from a post so that commentors that were still going at it could reference the conversation.

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  • 2
    If this is now the canonical place for asking for a moderator tool to move comments to chat (doubt it), here's the original request I made for posterity: Provide a tool for moderators to migrate comments to chat
    – user149432
    Commented Oct 14, 2011 at 17:15
  • @MarkTrapp Actually this answer was in frustration at having had my question closed of a duplicate of something I didn't think it was. Your post seems to be the one that it should have been closed as a duplicate of. That should be the canonical place for this one. (And if I thought they were really duplicates I would VTC this one to yours ;-)
    – Caleb
    Commented Oct 14, 2011 at 19:06
  • 6
    Technically, this question isn't for moderator tools. It's for users to be able to recognize that a comment conversation will not end quickly and can just say, "OK, everyone who cares, meet me in chat" and have a chat room already set up with previous comments and everything.
    – Nicol Bolas
    Commented Oct 26, 2011 at 4:28
  • The problem is that the 2 questions you refer to was closed as duplicate of the wrong question. The first moderator related question that your question should really be closed as duplicate of was the Provide a tool for moderators to migrate comments to chat originally posted by @user149432.
    – awe
    Commented Aug 19, 2013 at 9:44
0

I just had this issue with an existing (and ever growing) comment thread, where the other participant didn't seem to want to migrate.

One thing you can do, to migrate comments, is to simply create a chat room and post the permalink URLs of each comment (you can get the permalink from right clicking the timestamp of a comment). Posting the permalink generates a quote of the original comment, with a username and timestamp.

You can then comfortably delete or flag any remaining off-topic or obsolete comments.

Nonetheless, I fully support this feature-request. Migrate to chat should be easier and more predictable than it is now.

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-6

Copy the comments to a plain text editor, such as notepad, so that the UTF and link information is stripped from them. Afterwards, copy and paste the contents from the notepad editor into the chat window, and the comments will appear.

They may not be formatted very well, but they won't be links. However, they will be there, in your chat, for reference.

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  • 6
    Not really a solution to the feature-request. Merely a complicated workaround. There is also the things you have to do with adding a link back to the original question/answer where the discussion originated, and also a link on the original comments place to direct people to the chat so the "discussion" is not continued in the comments.
    – awe
    Commented Aug 19, 2013 at 9:48
  • You can copy and paste the comment links e.g. this one into chat and it will be oneboxed, with formatting and names and everything.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Jan 22, 2014 at 14:35

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