It is my understanding that the automatic systems on SE can delete comments for housekeeping reasons.
But are comments with upvotes (or highly upvoted comments over some threshold) deleted in this way ?
Does anyone know ?
Thanks in advance.
I'm not aware of any systems that auto-delete comments. If sufficient users flag a comment it will be auto-deleted or moderators can do cleanup manually, but I think that's it. I couldn't find anything on meta-se about any such system either.
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I've heard this idea (auto deletion cleanup of comments) mentioned many times on other SE forums, always as a comment by experienced users encouraging a user to move info in a comment to a question or answer. Perhaps it's an urban myth. ? – StephenG Sep 13 '17 at 5:36
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1@StephenG - they were probably using the verbiage about comments being subject to removal. There's an auto-comment out there somewhere as well as some common language from meta about it. Basically, comments are supposed to be used to help make questions and answers better, they aren't supposed to be something that permanently has to be read and if they get out of hand, they may be manually removed, so the best practice is to move useful information to the question or answer itself. – AJ Henderson♦ Sep 13 '17 at 5:38
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When someone casts a vote to close as duplicate, the first comment which references the dupe target is upvoted, and if there is none an automatic comment is posted. When the question is closed as a dupe, the comment used to be auto-deleted. I'm not sure whether this has been changed, either due to complaints where it wasn't an auto-comment or as part of the changes to support multiple dupe targets. – Peter Taylor Sep 14 '17 at 11:14
I don't think they are auto-removed, but I certainly hope that they are sometimes removed by moderators. Comments can have a variety of problems even when highly upvoted. In fact, on "hot network question" questions, comments which do not add real site value are often highly upvoted.
