On behalf of the mod team, we appreciate the extensive flagging of comments that the community is doing.

I thought it was going to be a spike then everyone would forget and we'd be back to normal, but we keep getting a sustained daily number of flags on comments that should be reaped. Keep up the good work!

@mxyzplk I'm curious, is it mostly too chatty flags? Or is there no clear forerunner out of the reasons for flagging?

I've been flagging obsolete in resolved comment chains I'm in...

We don't really look to hard at the flagging reason, since comments are temporary anyway - if I see the comment and don't see high value to it, bam it's gone. I've seen a mix of chatty, obsolete, and custom reasons typed in

Mainly I start paying attention to reason if it's "bad" - like, offensive, then it's time to get up in someone's shorts.

And it's OK to flag one in a chain, if I take the time to go to a comment chain I quickly evaluate them all

gotcha was just wondering things do get chatty and obsolete totally makes sense since the community is really good about editing in comment suggestions into answers and questions

And usually, scroll up and down to review the whole Q as well

hmmm I think ill do a drive by on my q's and a's

Yes, we really think keeping the changes into the questions and answers and minimizing life of comments makes for a much more powerful, usable, readable site. When I visit other SEs, some do the same and others don't, and the ones that don't are a lot harder to elicit information frmo.

@mxyzplk I recently mentioned on another "soft" SE site that comments-as-answers might not be awesome, and they leapt straight down my throat.

hahaha

@BESW The glories of decentralized teams

One of the responses was literally "But everybody does it!"

And another was basically that it's nice to have a way to provide answers you don't think are high enough quality to actually be answers.

"If everybody jumped off a bridge..."

Granted, that site has... other problems. It's a soft site where the kind of question which most obviously fits the standard SE format is considered "not a real question" by many on the site, accepted as a necessary evil to add bulk to the site so it can continue to also handle "real questions"--the kind which are different enough from the standard SE format that meta regularly explodes with arguments about what is and isn't okay to ask.

... I am curious and afraid.

Yeah - I do think there's a lot more room for SE central to help with pushing out best practices. I think they assume that "surely everyone on one of these other SEs is an expericed SO person" which is a very bad assumption

@besw could this be sci-fi and fantasy?

@JoshuaAslanSmith It could be.

hahahahaha

@BESW I can neither confirm nor deny that I inferred what I believe to be your intended meaning from italicizing the word could

@mxyzplk Yeah, I remember the first time I thought "Hey, what's this SO thing people are going on about?"

@JoshuaAslanSmith yeah - that's a site I should be all about, but I very rarely go to it.

I find it difficult to care about making sf.se a better community, because it hardly feels like a community at all.

@mxyzplk I tried to get in on it, got into a comment war over something to do with LOTR where it was clear both the asker and most of the answers for the question had nothing to do with tolkien, his related works, and things he's said on record.

that's funny, my big question there is a lotr on

one

about orcs and goblins being the same or different or what.

ended up a war between those who bothered with textual analysis across the years of different things he wrote and those who take a more... uh, in-fantasy-world "correct canon" view

lol

I mostly stick to esoteric Doctor Who trivia and the occasional motive-based Harry Potter question (which always gets challenged).

I think it was either the usual question about the eagles taking the ring to mt doom

No wait, I think it was definitely about why didn't Aragorn use the army of the dead to fight the war against sauron

both the question and the answer were completely and totally informed only by the films

because the question framed it as "why didn't the army of the dead continue to fight after the siege of gondo" and in the books their oath is fulfilled and they are released when the ships of the haradrim are seized in sw gondor on the coast.

Heh.

A lot of my DW answers boil down to "If there's any definitive answer, it's contradicted by other definitive answers, so here's a breakdown of the many ways that doesn't make sense, and here's the most popular attempt by fans to reconcile it all."

There's also a sizeable minority of "No, that Strong Female Character is not River Song."

@BESW "including that one who actually behaved exactly like River Song"

@JonathanHobbs "And also that other one who behaved exactly like her. No, not the other one either."

Dear Moffat: Please find someone else to write female characters for you. Perhaps even consider having a few more women on the writing staff--not that only women can write women well, but an all-male writing pool is not doing you any favours.

Yeah, so many of the "why didn't they" questions aren't really answerable (well, in a special case like there's a book that says why, it is, but they ask it of every poorly written SyFy character over there)

"Because the screenplay was written by a guy who was running out of coke, living in a four-person shared apartment, and his rent was due tomorrow" should be a default answer

@mxyzplk I think it's been argued that's a good default answer for a lot of oWoD questions, too.

@BESW Really the vast majority of "why did they" questions are both hard to answer but also not all that valuable