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Recently, I've been going through exiting topics on the SQA site cleaning things up along the way - marking "thank you", "it works", "you are welcome" or "good answer" type of comments as "not constructive" (apologies if it was too many flags). I've been doing this according to the StackExchange's comments policy, specifically:

When shouldn't I comment?

Comments are not recommended for any of the following:

Compliments which do not add new information ("+1, great answer!"); instead, up-vote it and pay it forward;

But, some of the flags were declined, even though they fit under the "When shouldn't I comment?" category. Note that I admit that some of the flags I raised were declined correctly - for instance, some of the comments, even though are "chatty" were a part of the context and had some value - in this case, I've flagged the comments mistakenly.

Following the Should +1 and thanks comments be a declined flag?, I've decided to bring it up here on meta. Please let me know the reasons for declined flags and advice on how I should think about flagging on SQA. Should I better use the "other" flag reason to better explain why I am flagging?

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    The handling of comments is a controversial issue (in the sense that many active users detest the current policy - or don't know about it), so you should probably always consider what effects your flagging or deletion will have: will it really save considerable time for readers, and if so will the positive effect of that be more relevant than the irritation you might be causing to the comments' authors? (I know this comment is not specific to this site, I just stumbled on the question and thought to give you my 2 cents)
    – gbr
    Jul 7 '17 at 16:59
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Often, particularly on older questions, it's more valuable to leave comment threads even if a specific comment in the thread doesn't meet the standards because the followup comments lose context.

That said, I'm not going to say I got all your flags correctly handled - I'm just as human as the next person on that front.

Another consideration that you might not be aware of is that if you flag a lot of comments as not constructive in a short time frame, the next few times that person comments they'll get auto-flagged for too many not constructive comments, which can add to the "fun" for the moderator team.

I've personally tried to be conservative about what I flag and what I remove just on principle.

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  • Thanks, Kate. I really appreciate what you are doing, I'll try to be less "annoying" and more to the point with the comment flags!
    – alecxe Mod
    Jun 27 '17 at 17:59

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