Regarding comments: Comments like "Terrible advice!" are not constructive (oftentimes leading to discussions, also) and I guess everyone agrees that they should be removed. But what about the nice ones like "Fantastic advice!" - it's not about length, both comments could be longer, but about not being constructive - would you delete them, too, as a moderator if they were flagged or you came across them?

The former is also unwelcome because it influences people negatively, but the latter kind may net the answerer a few additional upvotes. So the answerer may actually be glad to have (and keep) them around.

As a user, I would flag "Terrible advice" as abuse (as it's not "be nice"). Personally, comments that offer anecdotal support to an answer are ok by me.

@AnneDaunted Both positive and negative feedback is important, but the feedback should be constructive. We don't want to retain only positive feedback and discard all negative feedback, because that would be unhealthy for the site. However, the negative feedback should be constructive. ...

"How would this answer deal with scenarios A, B and C?" is constructive, "Terrible advice because this fails for A, B, C" is not. The former tries to improve the answer, the latter just aims to find faults.

Negative feedback should be encouraged, where it's due - but it should focus on the issue itself and not simply point out that the answer is terrible.

I agree with you about negative feedback, but my question was more about the positive feedback with no other useful information. Like "Hey! This is a great answer!" - offering no anecdotal support or any additional information whatsoever. Like an elaborate "+1".

Positive feedback on the answer is ok with me, because encouraging positive things is overall better than promoting negativity. As a matter of fact, an upvote gets +10, but a downvote only gets -2.

Yes, blind supportive comments don't really add to the answer any more than an upvote. Unless there's something substantive to add to the answer, they should be removed.

Positive feedback on the answer should be accompanied with either some anecdotal evidence or at least some explanation of why the answer is good.

It is not just to gain some additional upvotes for the poster (which is important), but also shows other readers that someone else found this answer useful. That makes the usefulness more clear than an upvote, because we can upvote anything for pretty much any reason.

@AnneDaunted By the way, that is listed as one of the "good" uses of comments in my mod Q&A. Disclosure: I edited the wording a little bit after reading your question here.

I agree with you both.

Masked Man just echoed me, but with more words... :D

Are you satisfied with the responses (comments) the questionnaires got so far?

@Snow Yeah, leave it to me to provide long winded explanations. :)

I've only really read my own as I don't wish to unconsciously plagiarize anyone else's answers. But I've been happy to be challenged by the comments - they've been fair.

I think the comments on the questionnaire were useful, and as I have replied there, their usefulness to me will continue beyond this election.

Glad to read that you find it useful. I hope the others do so as well.

It's an important job with great responsibility, so some grilling is necessary.

And it's been a shame that most of the grilling has been left to you. There's been other questioners, but you've done the bulk of it from what I've seen. The content of the Q&A has improved quality because of you.

Thanks! Last year it also seems to have been a bit calm. But there were fewer candidates.

And those three candidates were very good ones as well. Any of them would have made good moderators.

Maybe one of them gets a chance this time

I did consider contesting the previous election but found it too troublesome to answer the questionnaire and dropped out.

I've left my fingernails uncut in preparation for the coming week; I might be needing them for the added chewing.

As a result, we didn't have any controversial candidates last year, hence things were quite calm. :)

This year's started quite dramatic

Not that I enjoyed that.

And I really hope that lessons will be learned from it.

Yes, the first 3 days went way over the top. This somewhat goes back to the earlier discussion. The focus was entirely on how to prevent a certain candidate from getting elected. No matter how you look at it, a mod election shouldn't have led to a candidate seeking therapy in real life. I realise it was the last straw, but still all those personal attacks went too far.

At some point we should step back and look at the big picture. Workplace.SE is just one site among millions on the internet, there was no need to get worked up so much over an "undesirable" outcome of a mod election. Perhaps something to keep in mind for the end of the election when I get elected. ;)

@AnneDaunted "+1 good answer" matches against the list of comment types that take only one flag from any user to remove, on account of how they're trivally evaluated as noise.

a slightly more elaborate version of that would fit in the same category

@doppelgreener That is ok for sites like Stack Overflow where you can just copy the code and run it (in most cases) to verify yourself. For a site like this one, comments "validating" the answers should be allowed IMHO.

I'm not sure we need those, since we have upvotes to validate answers.

If it's actually adding information like "I've used this myself and it had so-and-so effect", as I understand it that's not inside the scope of that kind of comment.

Upvotes don't validate anything. Most of the questions asked here are not personally faced by us in real life, but we can still upvote them if we find them useful advice. A comment that explicitly states that someone out there has actually applied that advice and found the outcome beneficial is worth a million upvotes.

That's a separate category of comment from the "+1 good answer" variety I'm thinking of then. Anne Daunted was separating out anecdotal evidence comments as something else beside this variety. Those are fine.

A bit of fluff won't hurt anything, in fact it may encourage more answers. It never hurts to be nice.

You know what an interesting rule would be? (not that it could ever happen because it required a software change. The more answers on a question, the higher rep you need to add another one.

Like if a question has 3 answers you need 500, 1000 for 5 answers and 3000 for 10

Or just 3000 for adding when there's 5 answers already

The rationale is that it does take some experience here to see when a 6th answer isn't just more of the same.

@ChrisE Is that much of a problem? I haven't paid much attention to how many answers questions get in here.

Not really, it was just something that I noticed when I went to answer a question that there were 11 already. I'm just musing. On Quora it's ridiculous. You'l see a question, think about answering it and see that it has 100+ already.

huh. I just noticed something. One of the candidates hasn't posted anything herein over a year.

Good luck everyone!

Thanks @BenjaminGruenbaum :)