If a whole comment thread has become obsolete (for example, if the question has been clarified or if the discussion results have been included in an answer), should I

  • delete all my own comments and flag all the others as obsolete individually (which is a bit boring, since you can only delete/flag one comment every five seconds), or

  • flag a single one of the comments as "other..." and describe the situation?

What do the moderators prefer?

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up vote 47 down vote accepted

If the entire comment thread is obsolete, then you can flag the question/answer using "Other" and explain that all the comments are obsolete and should be deleted. We have an easy way to purge all comments from a single post.

It is much easier to use a single flag than flagging each individual comment.

Comment flags go into a different queue and it is possible that a single comment could get deleted without purging the entire obsolete conversation, so flagging the post would be better.

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4  
It's probably better to flag the post, as it is the post that contains the mechanism for purging comments, and I can see how a comment flag might get deleted without the purge occurring. – Robert Harvey May 14 '14 at 16:11
    
@RobertHarvey agreed, edited to state that. – bluefeet May 14 '14 at 16:14

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