Why were my "obsolete comment" flags declined?

Question

In this question there was a lot of commentary in relation to the original form of the question.

The question was heavily edited and morphed into a completely different question, rendering all the commentary (or very nearly all of it) obsolete as it related to prior issues that no longer exist.

Since I helped with the clarification and editing of the question, once it had been done I marked a great deal of the commentary obsolete. Much of that was declined by whomever reviewed it.

I cannot understand this- originally they were valid comments, but are no longer valid since the original issues have been completely removed from the question and will only confuse future readers who will be unable to see what they refer to.

Would the person who declined them care to explain the rationale behind leaving them there?

Answer 1

On Stack Exchange, comments are generally considered to be transient, temporary post-it notes which are meant to either seek clarification or help a poster improve the post. On Workplace SE, a large part of site moderation involves deleting obsolete comments which have served their purpose.

On PM.SE, as a beta site, we've not experienced a comment problem to the same degree as other sites; therefore, as moderators we generally don't clean up comments here.

Most threads don't extend long enough to create a noise problem, but in the case of this question's comment thread, it was indeed lengthy, and I think you were right to flag them and remove them.

So with that said, maybe this is a good time to create a meta discussion on how we should handle comment threads going forward. Most of us on this site don't have experience with obsolete comments to the same degree as on other parts of the network. The moderator who declined the flags may not have realized the content had been edited into the body of the post.

In the meantime, my suggestion is to use the "Other" flag to describe why you think the comments should be cleaned up, just so it's clear to moderators what the reason is, as it may not have been obvious since these types of flags are very uncommon here. Hope this helps!