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I have posted a comment on a question. The comment was deleted twice. The first time I thought I forgot to press enter, I re-posted it. In less than 10 minutes it was deleted again, clearly not because it was flagged. The comment was not rude, inappropriate or out of context. How can I find out who is the moderator who decided to remove my comment for no particularly good reason?

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Conveniently, it looks like your comment was captured in chat. It was posted on this question, and read:

Not an answer, but you should not do it not just because it is a fraud, but also because marrying implies a series of consequences that may force you to have to support her financially for the rest of your life.

This is not asking for clarification or suggesting improvement, and that's all comments should generally be used for. Comments are definitely not for partially answering the question, or answering a question that the OP didn't ask. You may have seen more flexible policies on other StackExchange sites, but IPS is fairly strict, largely because the comment volume is incredibly high, and the answers are the goal of the site, not side discussions. It's a long read, but you can find further discussion of comment policies on this meta question.

So who deleted it? In this case it turns out it was a mod, but it could very really have been just a sufficient number of users via flags (no moderators involved) - it was noted in chat both times you posted it, and users in chat do exercise their flagging privileges. But that's not really the right question. You could've instead asked whether there was a good reason, and it appears that yes, there was.

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    It seems there is a little robot that automatically raises a "flag for attention of chat users: potential answer in a comment" on all comments that include phrases like "you should", "you shouldn't" and "you need to." This quickly alerts chat users to most if not all answers posted in comments.
    – English Student
    Commented Apr 20, 2018 at 8:16
  • Yes, though it's definitely not "all", and it might not even be "most". There are a looooot if answers in comments here, and simple rules can only do so much.
    – Cascabel
    Commented Apr 20, 2018 at 14:14
  • Still, I really appreciate this site's determination not to allow answers in comments (unlike some other SE sites which are officially ambivalent on the matter.)
    – English Student
    Commented Apr 20, 2018 at 14:21
  • @Cascabel I strongly believe it was not flagged. If you can show it was flagged you should post proof, not simply make an assumption and assume it is true
    – user11175
    Commented Apr 20, 2018 at 15:14
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    It was deleted by a mod, @user, and was not flagged by the community. But . . . that's kinda irrelevant. As Cascabel said, it shouldn't have been posted in the first place.
    – HDE 226868 Mod
    Commented Apr 20, 2018 at 15:21
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    I would love to know how you can be confident that a deleted comment was not flagged. As far as I know nothing about this is revealed to anyone but mods (outside of the folks who know they personally cast flags of course). It turns out you were right, but it sounds like it may just have been a lucky guess. And I didn't assume - I said things like "likely" and "could also have been a mod". Not sure why I'm being asked to prove anything.
    – Cascabel
    Commented Apr 20, 2018 at 16:02
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    There's also the distinct possibility that it was flagged by an user, which attracted the attention of a mod who then deleted it before enough other users flagged it. It's important to remember that comments are supposed to be like post it notes, temporary markers, used to improve the quality of questions and answers. If something is important enough that it's concerning that it got deleted it should have been edited into a post.
    – sphennings
    Commented Apr 20, 2018 at 16:06
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I want to add that it is simply not true that just above mine there was a similar message that was not an answer. It seems strange that my message was deleted (twice) in 5 minutes, and others are not. It seems to me there is a lot of inconsistencies and I think this is a problem that should be addressed. The comment adds to the conversation, informs the OP of very strong and persistent consequences to his actions, similarly to the previous comments. It seems foolhardy for me to delete that, and only that one, comment.

enter image description here

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    It looks like all the off topic comments in that image have been removed from the question. That seems like a policy that is applied consistently to me. Remember just because someone else does something they're not supposed to does not give you licence to do the same. If you see comments that aren't suggesting improvements or requesting clarification, you can always flag them as no longer needed. This site works best when the community is engaged in the moderation process, instead of leaving all the work for the mods.
    – sphennings
    Commented Apr 20, 2018 at 15:34
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    This stuff is done by actual people who are not reading every page on the site continuously. Of course sometimes things are faster or slower, or get missed.
    – Cascabel
    Commented Apr 20, 2018 at 16:04
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    I don't really have much to add to what Cascabel said, so I'll leave this as a comment. I deleted them both. I saw them in chat when I was getting ready to head home from work and deleted them without looking at the remainder of the comments. Thanks for bringing the others to my attention. I've removed them, too.
    – Catija Mod
    Commented Apr 20, 2018 at 16:15
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    Because OP probably doesn't know why their comments were sent to chat in the first place, I'd like to add that there are bots that use regular expressions to try to intelligently discover comments that might be off topic or problematic based on word patterns, and it posts them to chat to have humans decide if they look okay.
    – BlackThorn
    Commented Apr 20, 2018 at 17:08
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    I am amazed about all the negative points. As @Cascabel and Catija said, the other comments were not removed. My question was appropriate. They did notice the comments after reading the question, and later removed them as well. But, when I asked the question for clarification, they were not.The negative points make no sense.
    – user11175
    Commented Apr 22, 2018 at 16:36
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    From what I saw, when your original comments were posted, the non-removed comments actually were asking for clarification, so it all made sense. Then others posted other comments that merited deletion, and it took longer to delete them because the people here are humans and not always doing this (see my comment above). None of that justifies complaints about speed/consistency of enforcement.
    – Cascabel
    Commented Apr 22, 2018 at 17:16
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    @Cascabel That is not rue, I posted a screenshot. No clarification was being asked. I actually did not even check to see they were removed after, but I trust that you did. But the screenshot is clear evidence that what I am saying is correct.
    – user11175
    Commented Apr 22, 2018 at 18:04

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