Are comments being deleted?

Question

I might be making this up. But it seems that comments are disappearing here and there. I assume that they're just not up to snuff, but I haven't noticed other SE sites just deleting comments outright. (again, though, I might be dreaming this too...I've been known to not always pay attention ;)

Answer 1

I think this is my fault.

In general, comments can be removed for several reasons. The bigger sites tend to be more strict about this but we don't do a lot of comment pruning here.

Typical reasons for removal:

• Rude or offensive
  We really don't get comments that fall under this banner (or at least I haven't seen any).

• Not constructive / off-topic
  I've deleted 2 comments for this reason:

  1. A comment asking mods to clean up a comment thread. There really wasn't a reason to clean up the thread so I deleted his comment to avoid other mods wasting their time on it.
  2. A comment suggesting that another user was trolling. I did some research and found this assertion to be unsupported¹ so I deleted it as noise.

• Obsolete
  I've deleted several comments in this category. If a comment references content that is no longer in the question/answer, it is usually removed to avoid confusion.

• Too chatty
  We have many comments that fit this description, but we're a growing community so I don't see a problem leaving them.

So yes, comments have been deleted. It's fairly rare, but comments get deleted when they distract from the real content.

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^{1 The only "evidence" of trolling was the question asker's display name. However, the question content gave no indication of trolling; the user has accounts on other SE sites with many questions and answers and no evident instances of trolling; and the display name in question is a common dictionary word with no offensive meaning.}