I'm fully aware that comments aren't for extended discussion, but sometimes it just happens. If an extended discussion is always an issue, there aught to be a limit on the number of comments, because I have no clue at what point the discussion is considered "extended".

I've always worked on the principle that sometimes you need comments back & forth to troubleshoot. When a conclusion is finally reached, you then write it up as an answer. Two downsides are that 1)unless you can get everybody to clean up their comments afterwards, some poor admin has to do it at some point; & 2) sometimes they really just devolve into 'going nowhere'.

@Tetsujin Comments can be used to troubleshoot - but only if it's a simple - did you check X and then it's done. If you need to have 10 comments back or forth, that indicates the question needs to be edited.

It should say - I don't know how to fix situation X. How do I troubleshoot it given I'm using this article y that explains what to do. (or show the search term you used to find a support article and then explain you couldn't even find that).

Solutions are generally trivial and documenting how to troubleshoot something to know what problem you really have is of great value to the site. No other resource does this like Stack Exchange does.

@WilliamTFroggard The system hard codes it and offers to move things to chat when you're past the "extended portion"

@Undo I disagree here. We host questions about all sorts of software bugs that get fixed. We don't close them in that case. We might close them if they continue to get bad answers - but that's not a given - especially when questions of any software are detailed enough to know what build you are running.

I do thing - beta software needs to have "beta" and a specific build included to be detailed enough (whereas we don't normally ask for build version on release OS since they move slower)

@Undo Excellent. If the voting on the meta post goes maybe 10 to 1 for this, I think we'd have good enough reason to revisit it. As it stands, there is no big opinion being shown on that post - so it looks like things will stay the course for now

The hard-coded move doesn't seem to reliably trigger though. Recently, I had the a comments section grow to 16 comments, without the usual message.

@bmike If it'd help I can write an answer to that question

@Undo meta is for people making arguments for and against. In the end - the votes will need to accumulate, but if enough answers for the change get enough votes, that also helps tup things.

@WilliamTFroggard yes - the code seems to ignore comment threads with more than two people and/or slow pace of adding comments. I don't have access to the source code, so I don't know the details of the algorithm.

My personal level is 3 attempts to clarify - if I can't get someone to where they need to be after three comments from me - I try another route.

Is anyone here familiar with the GPGTools suite for Mac, by chance?

@AdamLiter Just ask away

You can assume yes and fire up a question here or on the main site.

Eventually someone will find it and answer.

@bmike Thanks for the encouragement. :) This SuperUser question actually answered my question. Installing MacGPG2 changed how the configuration for gpg-agent, I think.