What's with the new
Please avoid extended discussions in comments. Would you like to automatically move this discussion to chat?
message?
There were literally 6 comments on a post, and this comment came up. It's rather annoying -- is there a reason why it's popping up so early?
To resolve the issue you point out in your comment, I've made a proposal:
The "problem" I'm referring to is the problem posed in that question -- the message tells me Would you like to automatically move this discussion to chat?, which makes no sense with the reasoning presented here -- you guys are saying it should be in the question itself, whereas the message says otherwise. That's why I don't like the message, especially when it's not an "extended" discussion in any way. I'm trying to clarify what the answer means in my situation, and the message gets annoying
PROPOSAL: Can we improve "automatically move this discussion to chat"?
As for any other confusion about the message, refer to my previous answer:
I'm going to assume that it's the comment thread on Custom NVIDIA Resolutions?.
Which falls under the one of the two reasons outlined in the related question:
Extended discussions are not what this network was created for. This is a Q&A Site. If you have a need for extended discussions, then either a set of question/answer edits is due (thus negating the usefulness of the comments that were indicative of the need for change) or the comment thread is off topic.
The comment thread could be turned into useful edits so that other people will benefit and don't have to read a reply-like comment thread to find more details. If there in no benefit in terms of questions and answers, your comments can be considered noisy as they show up between the answers. Even though they are limited, some people still expand and read the comments. We should assure they are useful...
Comment threads aren't designed for back-and-forth discussing as that's what the chat is for but they are solely meant for comments on your answer so that you can improve it (hence, the word comment).
Furthermore, this algorithm doesn't necessarily kick in after each 6 comments:
Having said that, the message is only triggered when it detects a repeated back and forth between two people in a short period of time. So if it's just two people going back and forth, that's either a thread-war, or it's just a conversation between two blokes.
If you have multiple people commenting, it will take a lot more comments total before this would trigger. However, we could tell that if two people respond thrice in half an hour of time it does trigger...
Mod flags could be triggered automatically to handle more off-topic:
I also suspect (altho I've no proof) that it triggers a mod flag once that occurs so a mod can make sure that the discussion doesn't need to be cleaned up. As that is one of the responsibilities of the mod team (to clean up the garbage aka the things which just clutter the site) then I suspect this is also happening.
Although this is purely speculation, someone should verify (or even implement) this...
Last, it's meant as a prevention (and is only shown to you both I belief):
It's just a message to let you know that chat might work better for your discussion. Comments don't work as well for long discussions, but they are for discussion, so you can use them that way. Try and keep the discussion about the post.
Just imagine what would happen with a preventive message that triggers much later.
When six comments by just two people are posted in quick succession, that's a strong indicator that they are using the comments for chatting, and we don't want that; for chatting, there's the chat.
We've been playing with the threshold numbers that qualify a comment thread as a discussion, and so far the current values seem to be quite good. I'd take your particular case as a good example that they are – you and Mokubai clearly are having a back-and-forth discussion in the comments.
Note that this currently is just discouraging comment-chit-chat, and encouraging using the actual chat for that. In the long run, if we see this feature works out well, we might actually prevent further commenting, thus force the users to go to chat.
comment). Well, I'm even going to include this last part about the word comment in my answer... :)Would you like to automatically move this discussion to chat?, which makes no sense with the reasoning presented here -- you guys are saying it should be in the question itself, whereas the message says otherwise. That's why I don't like the message, especially when it's not an "extended" discussion in any way. I'm trying to clarify what the answer means in my situation, and the message gets annoying.