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Two days ago I replied to a comment (under my own question, which happened to be closed later).

To my surprise my last comment was seemingly deleted by an admin.

The comment was acceptable, as I recall. But it was maybe no relevant anymore (since the question was then closed).

But that's pretty strange to see a comment disappear without any way (afaik) to realize it's been actually deleted, for sure!

  • Is there a way to list deleted comments, or comprehend it's been deleted by an admin?
  • If no, should that be a new feature?

FYI the question

2 Answers 2

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Only moderators can view deleted comments. I am fairly certain there is no way to know for sure that there are deleted comments on a post, other than of course remembering that one was there and seeing that it's not anymore.

The idea of notifying commenters of comment deletion has been discussed on MSE. It's unlikely to be implemented for two reasons:

  1. Comments are never supposed to be permanent. If there's anything critical in them, that information should be used to compose or improve a post.
  2. Some users have posted a lot of comments that eventually became obsolete. Poking such users every time a comment of theirs disappears would generate quite a bit of noise in their inboxes.

If you do something really, horribly bad in a comment, it's possible that a moderator will message you privately or poke you in chat. But one of your comments being deleted doesn't usually mean you did anything wrong; they're just being cleaned up.

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The comment you deleted essentially was an attempt to extract an answer out of a off topic/closed question via comments. The deletion was by design.

Comments should be considered to be ephemeral - they are liable to be deleted at any time, for a variety of reasons. If something matters, it needs to eventually be rolled into a question or answer.

When used to clarify they go obsolete. Sometimes they devolve into discussion or bickering. As far as I understand the SE model, there's almost nothing that really belongs, long term, as comments.

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  • "The comment that was deleted", I suppose. And I wrote it [I think] before the question was closed. Ok, maybe not in the inbox, but at least have a counter, similar to "helpful flags", that gives the number of deleted comments, since that doesn't happen that often (at least on SO), would be great.
    – Déjà vu
    Commented Sep 25, 2016 at 15:49
  • @ringø - You wrote it after the question was closed. You replied to my comment, which told explained your question was not on topic, but you still attempted to extract an answer from me. Comments by design are meant to be deleted when they no longer serve a purpose. If you want a Stackexchange feature to be created, this isn't the proper place to request it, you want Meta.stackexchange but don't expect this to happen because comments are meant to be deleted.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Sep 25, 2016 at 16:01
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    Technically asking here would probably possibly get seen by a cm. I seem to recall that we were told that feature requests on per site meta's are fine. I do ask on mse cause more eyeballs.
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Commented Sep 25, 2016 at 23:44
  • @JourneymanGeek - I only mentiont that fact because this would be a network wide feature.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Sep 26, 2016 at 14:13

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