Hijacking of my question in comments

Question

Some people have hijacked my question about cats using a cat flap and started talking about cats exterminating wild species. Is that really reasonable on a pets site? I feel it's rather insulting and unkind of them, yet my flagging of one of their comments was ignored. The question is here:

Cat won't use cat flap

Answer 1

Sorry for the bad experience, the situation was dealt with and should now be resolved.

1. The comment was originally posted as an answer. Since it didn't answer your question, it was converted to a comment.
2. The comment was flagged as rude by 2 users. I felt that, although it was controversial, it didn't violate our Code of Conduct, so I didn't delete the comment.
3. Within less than 1 hour the comment prompted other users to start a lengthy discussion which had nothing to do with your original question, therefore it was moved to chat.

Sorry it took us a while to react to the problem, but we cannot monitor everything that happens here in real time. If any user starts discussions in the comments again, please feel free to flag it again.

Answer 2

I am sorry for you to have had this experience.

Please be patient while waiting for your flags to be handled. It's not that they had been ignored, please take into account that Pets is a relatively small site with only 4 moderators and it could take a while for the flags to have been processed in case of none of moderators being online, up to several hours actually in some cases. I have acted immediately after noticing both your flags and this post, but at the time it happened I was in the bathroom ^.^

All the comments have been moved to chat. In my opinion some, but not all of them, were indeed directly harrassing or unkind, and I marked your reports accordingly as helpful/declined. But yes, they all were irrelevant to the essence of question being asked and not constructive.

It's not really that common for such discussions to happen in the comments in my experience, but they sometimes do. Cats endangering local fauna is in my observation the most "popular" of these polarizing topics that have a great potential for stirring up unneeded drama. I cannot really attribute malice to the participants of such violent discussions, even though such arguments are definitely unwelcome there; we are all pet and animal lovers there after all, and we deeply care about their well-being, and thus we are sensitive about certain subjects.