@Catija It seems pretty weird to me too, but I guess you have to keep in mind how many users see the site. One in a thousand things actually happen. Still funny though!

What number d'ja dial?

Okay, protip, don't post an answer in comments as the next comment after me saying not to answer in comments.

Meh. I missed the town hall thingy. :( Stupid work.

@Catija Probably easier to read after the fact anyway.

@Jefromi I have a major TL;DR issue with transcripts... If I can't still participate, I won't read them because I have to fight with myself to not respond to stuff because it was over and done with.

Ah :(

Particularly with something like this where it's about getting people's input on the site.

They might write up a summary.

An awful lot of the time was spent on "comments, wtf?"

A lot of ideas, many conflicting, from different sites about what works, what doesn't, and how to fix it.

That's one of the problems... to make "standardized" rules when nearly every site uses the site features slightly differently... and some use them in radical ways that weren't intended.

Especially for something like comments.

Yup!

There are sites that basically don't delete comments, and sites like this where we're pretty vigilant, and sites that wish they could delete comments but it's too much work.

@Jefromi Any thoughts on this: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/279098/… I don't know much about how protecting works but I don't know that this proposal is the best solution but I would be interested in having someone to talk to about it... assuming you're around.

@Catija I have a little time!

It seems like the issue you pointed out in the comments is more that you can't pick a time length for protection like you can with locks.

Most of the questions I see get protected don't have issues with extended comment threads... which is why I don't see the value in this proposal.

I understand that it might be an issue on some sites but I don't feel like it should be the default for all protected questions.

Hmmm... could be about the sites you're on.

There are a lot of sites that end up protecting a lot of their high-traffic questions (HNQ or otherwise).

I know on cooking we mostly just end up protecting old questions that periodically get awful late answers, and I agree, the comment protection isn't really necessary there.

At the same time it's not really such a high cost; everyone with any rep on the site can still comment.

I sort of agree with you though that ideally you'd get to pick what you want to stop.

Yeah. I know 50 rep isn't that difficult to get... but I'm a member on several sites that I don't use, ever... and I've occasionally left a comment on an interesting answer on one of them that I wouldn't have been able to do.

On protected questions you mean?

I don't know. I thought I'd done it once on Photography but I don't have any comments there, so either I never left the comment or it was deleted. But it was certainly a HNQ that got a ton of attention. I'm not a big commenter, in general, so I don't think it'd usually foul me up... I just am not convinced that it's a great FR... but it's gotten so many upvotes in a short amount of time that I figure I'm missing something to be the only one with reservations.

So, there are a lot of sites that struggle a lot with floods of low-quality comments.

I think they're basically looking for any tool at all which would help them avoid that, and they'd gladly lose a few comments from users not active on their sites in exchange for being able to keep questions clean when they want to.

But if this is adopted, it would potentially affect sites that don't have an issue with it... which is why I suggested making it separate from or an option in the process of protecting the question... and it would affect questions that were autoprotected from spam, which never have issues with comments... It's not a bad initial idea but it needs a lot of refinement.

But I'm afraid to post a counterproposal as an answer because I don't like downvotes.

I think the collateral damage is really low.

I'm not saying I disagree with you, it does sound like it'd be best if it were optional.

But I also think that even if it weren't optional, it might be way way better than what's going on now.

The current situation really does seem backwards - you can't answer but you can comment, and normally we require more reputation to comment than answer.

Sure... I get that part. But answers on a HNQ can do more damage than comments and they're harder to delete. Comments can be shunted into chat.

You might have a different perspective on that if you were a mod.

Comments are a pain to clean up.

Maybe.

And if you're deleting a lot of comments, you really want to keep more from showing up.

You have to go through a large number of things and evaluate whether each one is useful or not.

People don't flag them nearly as much as answers so you have to keep an eye actively on things.

People completely disregard any warnings you may add in the comments, including attempted redirections to chat.

Sure... but by the same token, if all you want to do is protect the question from an onslaught of comments (maybe it's not getting tons of answers, just lots of comments), if it were possible to protect the comments alone, you could let people still answer...

It's easier to ask for a modification of an existing feature than the addition of an entirely new feature.

I don't disagree, comment-only protection sounds cool.

But I think comment+answer protection also sounds like a huge improvement in a lot of situations.

I guess I'm not enough of a developer to know whether it's more difficult to tack comment protection onto general protection than to make it on its own...

You still have to create the comment protection module...

Right, but you don't have to create an entirely new question status.

And you don't have to build extra UI.

But can't you use the existing UI for question protection?

You have to modify it to ask what you want to protect against.

I'm not saying any of this is impossible or even that hard, just... every extra thing you do takes time.

Sure. But Andy always likes to say... if it's worth doing something, you should do it right... unless you're up against a deadline, and then do it dirty... but there's no deadline with this.

The canonical response to that is "don't let perfect be the enemy of good".

There essentially is something like a deadline for everything the devs do.

They have limited time, they can only do so much, so every time they spend twice as long on something in order to make it 10% better, they're entirely giving up on doing some other thing.

Right, I think the issue here is that I don't think that the "rolling it all into one" solution is "good".

I think it's dramatically better than status quo.

Which is, you ostensibly protect your question against new/external users, and it doesn't actually stop them from the main way those users tend to interact.

I do get it, I do often want to leave comments, but it's really not very often that I want to on a protected question, and in all honestly I don't think it's that likely I'll have something to say that no active users from that site will come up with.

And the problems from crazy comments are just sooooo much bigger.

But the users this is protecting against probably really isn't users who actually think through stuff like you or me...

Exactly!

This stops all the people who post tons of comments without thinking.

Anyway, have to go. Thanks for the chat.

Oh, okay, bye!