hello@quid May I know why my most recent flag was declined? wasn't the comment rude?

@Bellatrix different people have different notions of rude. I personally would have edited away two of the three interrogation marks, which had marked the flag as helpful. However I tend to agree that the content of the comment is not rude. It is mostly alright to be direct and even blunt. To say "This is wrong." , "This is incomplete." etc, is not rude. If something is added for excessive emphasis like "This is utterly and totally wrong. I never seen such a wrong answer." Then this would be.

If there is some emphasis like "This is completely wrong." we are in a bit of a gray area.

@quid Oh ok. I thought that a comment of the style like this: You didn't answer my question! What does blah blah mean ??? counts as rude

@Bellatrix it's close to the line. As said, I might have slightly edited it. What helps a a bit is that it was not about the commenters question and what helps a lot is that it was actually a legitimate concern raised. But, of course, it will not make it in the handbook of best practices for giving feedback either.

@quid It was not about the commenters question but the commenters answer, there should be respect for both sides equally, IMO. Specially that user, more than 5k answers, such a good contributor

@quid: Hello! I don't know who handled my flag requesting moving this thread to HSM SE. While I don't really care whether it is moved, I had thought that it was off-topic because it was not about any mathematical concept, problem, puzzle or software, and the help centre explicitly says that history and development of mathematics is better asked at HSM SE. Am I missing a catch?

If questions about mathematician quotes are supposed to be kept on Math SE, I will not flag them for moving in the future.

@Bellatrix I meant that the comment (on the answer) was not written by the user that had asked the question. If the fact that the user that had answered has already many contributions to the site should be taken into account at all, it should be rather the other way around. They should be able to handle the criticism even when presented bluntly, which actually they did.

@user21820 the point there is to give advice to obtain optimal results. It does not mean it is off-topic here and must be asked there. Indeed it explicitly says it is on-topic in the help center (my emphsis): "There are certain subjects that, while still on-topic here, might be better addressed by one of our sister sites:" followed by a list including history of mathematics.

@quid Oh I missed that, sorry. Thanks for explaining!

@Bellatrix technically any criticism of a question or answer is rude. Telling someone they are wrong is rude, but if deleted every such post the site would cease to be functional.