9

I just came across a comment flag for a comment that was not constructive (it was a LMGTFY link). it was a useful comment topic though so I edited the comment and replaced the LMGTFY link with one to the relevant Wikipedia article.

But then I hit a problem: How to dismiss the comment flag.

  • Currently the only options are to 'Dismiss' the flag - which goes on the flaggers record as 'comment flag declined', which is a negative thing really.

  • Or I could 'delete' the comment. But I didn't want to do that either because I've now made it useful.

What I could have done is to choose 'delete' and then just manually go an undelete the comment. But that seems a bit of a hack really.

So really, we could do with a third comment flag option "Helpful flag but I'll keep the comment around anyway" (or words to that effect).

We have this option for responding to normal post flags, so why not comments?

(And yes, I know that comments are second-class citizens, but if they are important enough for mods to be able to edit and delete the things then we should be able to dismiss flags against them too)

5
  • You have a third option - delete the offending comment and leave a better one yourself.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Jun 26 '14 at 21:37
  • 5
    @AnnaLear I can't do that. I'm a moderator - the only comments we can write are of the telling-off variety. we can't be leaving helpful, relevant comments!
    – JonW
    Jun 26 '14 at 21:41
  • @JonW BANANA CREAM PUDDING DANGIT!
    – voretaq7
    Jun 26 '14 at 21:58
  • 1
    Huh, editing the comment should have dismissed the flag as helpful. Next time do it from the flag handling interface ;)
    – ɥʇǝS
    Jun 26 '14 at 22:20
  • @ɥʇǝS We just tried a test of whether an edit auto-dismisses the flag but editing the comment didn't dismiss the flag, even after refreshing the page following the edit. (I didn't do it from the flag interface though, I wanted to see it in context).
    – JonW
    Jun 26 '14 at 22:35
6

The obvious solution is to dismiss the flag as "helpful" once a moderator has edited the comment. (It's so obvious, in fact, that up until just now I thought that was the actual behavior. I don't edit comments a lot.)

1
  • 1
    It seems an obvious solution, yes. Provided we can somehow dismiss the flag overlay that will still be there on the question (or just remember that on editing a comment it will have dismissed the flag, so the process will be: edit then hit F5).
    – JonW
    Jun 26 '14 at 21:43

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/234652/moderators-could-do-with-another-comment-flag-resolution-option?noredirect=1
meta.stackexchange.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2022-05
117143
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:WRLBL6RMJAVK462BPGD225KN45QZXIXD
<urn:uuid:b1b4b591-6a0b-404f-98b6-1e7beff22d25>
2022-01-23T22:22:41Z
151.101.65.69
text/html
sha1:QCPS7TVJ4BZK4B4B3ECUMVZEYFQ3HBV7
<urn:uuid:b8e2cfb3-bc65-4d5d-ba74-85115d47bcad>
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/234652/moderators-could-do-with-another-comment-flag-resolution-option?noredirect=1
response
<urn:uuid:e337ea28-3a50-40dd-93ba-32ed539b392f>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2022-05
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2022
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-84
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.3-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/