7

I'm new to this part of SE, and read a whole lot of questions, really fast.

Often they have a comment like this:

Hi Lucas, welcome to GDSE and thanks for your question. If you want to know more about the site, please see the help center or ping one of us in chat once your reputation is sufficient (20). Keep contributing and enjoy the site! – Vincent♦ Dec 12 '14 at 15:39

for example over here.

As you see it is from Dec 12 2014 and of interest for nobody, not even to Lucas. Trying to find out, if there is useful information in the comment, I have to read it. It's doable if you cross such a thing one time per day, but not over and over again.

Can't such noise be removed automatically after one month for example?

I flagged some of them as too chatty but could have chosen 2 different reasons, as obsolete or not constructive.

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  • 1
    I don't see it as that much of a problem given no one reads them. With that being said, I am fine with them being removed
    – Zach Saucier
    Aug 9, 2015 at 18:40
  • Doing so might also leave some secondary comments as irrelevant
    – Zach Saucier
    Aug 9, 2015 at 19:05
  • 1
    @Zach I do take that into consideration when removing obsolete comments. I try and avoid leaving secondary comments like that, otherwise it looks like someone is talking to themselves
    – JohnB
    Aug 9, 2015 at 22:08
  • To be blunt: I've always found those welcome messages to be way more impersonal than I think they were intended to be.
    – DA01
    Aug 14, 2015 at 21:34

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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Yes, there's no need for such welcoming comments to hang around indefinitely. I remove them if I stumble across any in a post that hasn't had activity for a while. I suppose "obsolete" would be the most appropriate flagging reason.

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As the one who is guilty of a lot of these comments, I have no problem with them being flagged as obsolete or removed. Pease don't use any other flag reason, though.

It is good to take into account, though, that there's also a lot of 'welcome' commentens that contain actual, relevant requests or critique, which should be preserved. So please don't blindly flag or remove comments that start with 'Hey, [user], welcome to GD.SE...'. Some of them might still be relevant!

As a matter of fact, I have started to actually remove really old welcome comments by hand. It's a nasty job, though, and I make them faster than I can deleted them. So any help is welcome!

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  • Is there no moderator tool to search for those comments? Using the ordinary Question search, I don't find such comments - maybe by google? It might be a question for general-meta, then.
    – user unknown
    Aug 10, 2015 at 8:15
  • @userunknown See edit. Even if there were such a tool, it would most likely also delete the comments that are stille relevant :/
    – Vincent
    Aug 10, 2015 at 8:18
  • 1
    @user it would be possible to find them using the API (you can try it out yourself with this simple API call), but we'd still evaluate them on an individual basis as opposed to blindly deleting based on whatever parameters. Other than the API, we don't have any special moderator ability to search for comments based on the text within them.
    – JohnB
    Aug 10, 2015 at 18:57
  • You can also use sql querries on thw db directly @johnB this is potenttially more convenient. data.stackexchange.com
    – joojaa
    Aug 11, 2015 at 19:19
  • This querry should help you a lot: data.stackexchange.com/graphicdesign/query/345127/… it finxs all posts with Welcome to and are older than 14 days old. it then lists the text and link to post
    – joojaa
    Aug 11, 2015 at 19:40
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There are:

  • 248 welcome messages starts with the phrase Welcome to or welcome to
  • of the first 40 questions, which are relatively recent 8 are such that they could be deleted without much thought. This means:
    • Assuming my sample is representative about 20% of the messages would be immediately expendable.
    • About 50 posts should be deleted offhand.

You can get the entire data as a CSV file from this link

2
  • So it's not always the same macro/template/text in use? Maybe not a macro/template/... at all in many cases? That would of course mean handcontrol.
    – user unknown
    Aug 12, 2015 at 9:47
  • @userunknown Some user s use it but we prefer a more personal touch.
    – joojaa
    Aug 12, 2015 at 9:53

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