This morning I'm feeling a little grumpy about comments. :) Particularly, too many short answers being left as comments when they should be answers, or left off entirely.

Using the comments robs us of the ability to vote up or down or suggest edits, and basically defeats the functioning of the Stack Exchange engine. And since comments on the question go above real answers, it's a way to get in a first word, which is unfair to the real answers.

And not just answers — they push down comments which might be used to get clarification and improve the question itself — the intended purpose of comments to questions.

If you have a good, succinct answer, please put it in the answer section. If you know that your comment is an incomplete answer, it's probably best to think about how to round it out. Or maybe just let someone else answer. (Or, if you really can't resist, think about coming back later after someone else answers and deleting your comment so it doesn't distract. Maybe it could even fit as an edit to another answer, or a comment to an answer, which is less harmful since at least the answer comes first.)

I guess I have mixed thoughts on comments like "Here's a youtube video on this subject", or "Google for foo and you'll see..." That's often pragmatically helpful, which is good, but... We're pretty strict about not allowing these as answers, but having those same things as comments doesn't solve the problems noted above. (Why does this get page-position priority over full answers? What if the video is pulled or moved and no one bit a mod can edit to fix?) I think it's really better to take the time to provide at least a brief real answer along with the link.

The main exception is when the question is clearly going to be closed (and as something other than a duplicate). In that case, comments can help the user and are really better than full answers (because answer on off-topic questions encourage more of the same). http://meta.photo.stackexchange.com/q/4797/1943

On several other SE sites where I participate, comments are regularly deleted by the mods en masse even if they're helpful. I like that we don't tend to do that here, but it does mean we should be more careful of starting messiness. I know I'm guilty of all of this myself sometimes so I'm not on a high horse or anything. It's something we can all do to improve the quality of our Q&A archive.