"This is the last comment in this answer, the discussion has gone full circle, any further comments are pure noise and we've already locked the question once due to the excessive and mostly off topic comment discussion. If you have anything more to say, use your votes or take it into chat. **** if there any more comments, please flag, excessive comment discussions is my new favourite suspension reason. – Yannis Rizos♦ 3 hours ago"

So, when an answer has over 50 upvotes and provide a lot of good information, but also information that is wrong and we point that out, it's considered "pure noise"? I can't use my votes to vote it down, and it has already received enough upvotes to reach the snowballeffect where anything stated is true and further upvoted. So I'm taking this to chat.

First off: I'm a bit butthurt because my (and other people's) comments were considered noise. Second: What should we do? There's a question with false information with a lot of votes, and we're not allowed to comment on it. As I'm new here, I wonder how to solve these issues? :)

Well @YannisRizos might be able to give you his reasoning...

I found no way to contact him directly, and was told to take it into chat, so that's what I did. ;)

@Matsemann Hello ;)

Your comments, or the other comments in the question, weren't the problem there, I'm referring to "any further comments" as noise.

Two other users using the answer for an off topic fight was the main issue. Their comments were since removed.

I had to lock the question for a while and send mod messages to both of them, however they never received them because of this recent bug, so that comment was my second option of notifying them without pinpointing them.

Locking the question is the worst possible solution but I don't have the time or the energy to go around safeguarding each and every question from users who abuse comments. I understand that comment might not have been ideal, but you have to understand that the OP was getting spammed with a ton of notifications that had almost nothing to do with his answer, and a second lock wouldn't help (as the first failed).

In any case, comments are not meant for extensive discussions. Your two comments are just fine, you made your point, I don't see what else you can possibly add to the discussion (that hasn't already been said by previous commenters). If you have a better answer to the question, please don't waste your energy commenting and post the answer instead. We love answers, we hate comments!

As for contacting me directly, either ping me in chat using the @username format or since I'm a moderator flag any post or comment for moderation attention.

@YannisRizos Hi, and thanks for your reply. I never saw the off-topic fight, which I hope explains why I misjudged your comment. :) Consider making it clear next time that you have cleaned up. I appreciate your work in helping the community, so I hope I didn't offend you. I was just curious as "how to" deal with situations like this.

@Matsemann Don't worry about it, it's a good thing you didn't see the off topic comments, that's not really what we want newer users like yourself seeing. All the participants in the discussion (on and off topic) are regular users and probably understood where I was coming from, but I get it that it wasn't clear for a newer user.

That said, always prefer a good answer to yet another comment in an already long comment thread, the system is tuned against them (automatic flags, lower visibility etc), if you have something valuable to add to the discussion and it answers the question, go for it ;)

@Matsemann And since the chatter and the flag war (participants were flagging each other's comments) died down, I've deleted the comment. It stayed there for about 5 hours, hopefully those that was mostly addressed to, saw it. If not, well, I'll deal with them.

@YannisRizos Hey! How much time you spend of SE every day. Looks around 2 hours. Great work fella!

@Ubermensch About a couple of hours per day... I'm mostly working from home, which means that I have very flexible hours, so sometimes it might look like I'm here all the time, when in reality I just have a tab open on ProgSE and check it for a couple of minutes every two hours...

@YannisRizos Great commitment. I do work close to home. But here I would have a decent internet connection only 12 hours a day

@Ubermensch It's no big deal, for the most part it's fun ;) It does get a bit boring when I have to hunt down spammers or stop fights like the one I've described above, but in general being a mod is fun.

@joshuadrake Re your flag: Protecting a question only means that users under 10 rep can't answer it. Is that what you had in mind? If so, the question doesn't have any answer (yet) from low rep users, why would we want to protect it?

@YannisRizos good point

I had a brief twinkling of that issue about 30 seconds after flagging it, but got distracted

@YannisRizos Bye!

Hello

@WorldEngineer Hey, I was writing a (poor) answer to the first soft. eng. question...

...when you deleted it...

@WorldEngineer Heh, no worries... Anyways my answer would be that members of the SHARE user group (it was a user group in 1955) should be considered pioneers of soft.eng. as they went a step further from what was common at the time, and emphasized concepts as re-usability of code (through their code library). Although a volunteer group, they modeled themselves after other engineering disciplines, having a code of conduct, etc.

@WorldEngineer Feel free to steal that and test drive the new insta-answer feature. I'm a bit bored to do the research now and I've already hit the rep cap.

@WorldEngineer John yes, Radical no. Ρίζος is the male form of ρίζα which means root, and it was adopted as the family's surname sometime in the mid 1850's, although originally it was used as an insult.

The insult being that the family had rooted in one place, while descending from Roma who took great pride in their nomadic lifestyle.

Ρίζος is the first part of ριζοσπάστης, which translates to radical.

@WorldEngineer Yeah probably ;)

@WorldEngineer Bah, our record keeping sucks, I can never hope to get back that long...

@WorldEngineer You'll need to expand this a bit programmers.stackexchange.com/a/149881/25936

@WorldEngineer The answer. First thing you should add is references for my bold claims ;)

@WorldEngineer A better explanation of what SHARE was, what it is now, etc. Check the references in the wikipedia article for stuff that would make stand as a complete answer, the SHARE Operating System, GM-NAA I/O and the relationship between SHARE and free software... That's the part I was bored to do ;) Also, it wouldn't hurt if you spelled my surname right ;)

no worries, I would have edited it myself, but it made me chuckle...

@WorldEngineer Easy mnemonic: ZZ -> knows math, Z -> doesn't.

that works too

Well that's a good thing!

@WorldEngineer The NATO conferences... Yes that's a good answer, and stupid of me to not think about it (having served under NATO).

@WorldEngineer I think you could adjust the question a bit to also ask when the term was first used / popularized, to fit the answer a bit more...

And if I'm not bored later on I might attempt a fuller SHARE answer.

@YannisRizos I just have to put this out there:

@Dynamic What?

Of the answers you wrote for this weeks contest, they're awesome :P

Thanks ;)

But they are the same answer essentially ;)

@YannisRizos Honestly, it looks like this week is pretty popular.

@Dynamic Well it's the easiest of the four tags...

I promised myself I wouldn't close any of the history questions during the contest week, but I'd probably be all over them any other week.

@YannisRizos Would you say that some of them would be closed any other week?

@Dynamic Anyways sorry I missed the blog meeting, and constantly delayed the issue, I'm catching up with the transcript right now.

@YannisRizos Its all good. I pinged you about Jarrod... it's over there ->

Don't know why.

Hoping to open the blog with the contest results.

I'm going to steal some of the results you posted on Meta :P

@Dynamic Closed and possibly re-opened, the BASIC question for example was closed and re-opened. Didn't really mean that they would be closed any other week, just that I would have been all over them any other week, but this week I let the other mods handle them.

@YannisRizos Seems like it didn't take you too long to get comfortable with moderation :-)

@YannisRizos If your not busy, can we move this conversation to the blog room? I have a few questions.

@Dynamic Sure

@YannisRizos Wow: youtube.com/watch?v=xc-TSAQkqJ0&feature=relmfu

Didn't know things were that bad over there...