Oh HAHAHAHAHHA the posting said"

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Checking cuteness coefficient... succeeded.
Turning awesomeness up to 11.

SO KYOOT!

Hi dabitch, this question might be deleted as well. I don't think we're supposed to discuss MF here. Or, maybe this question doesn't break the rules. Who knows.

I've had one comment deleted in AskMe: "What a bunch of do-gooders." I totally expected and deserved to be deleted.

Oh. Yeah I guess it is iffy (in which case delete away mods, I won't mind!) but it's not the blue that I wish to discuss, really. I'm wondering if it is a good policy to use as I sometimes have problems with threads totally derailing and kinda wonder if comment-deletion/hiding may help steer people on track - or will people get annoyed?

I mean, I have nowhere NEAR the comments of metafilter, obviously so it only happens rarely but in one 185 comment thread I was itching to get two do-badders to stay on topic and just didn't know if hiding their comments would be the right way of doing it... I mean, is it better to just say "dudes, stay on topic"?

As long as you keep this conversation away from attacks on MeFi and more in the direction of "Generally, how should community comments be moderated & how does moderation make you feel", then I personally haven't got a problem with it.

On the other hand, any of the other metachat moderators may have a problem with it. If it gets nuked, then you know why.

I think it's sort of pointless to delete comments if the train has already jumped the tracks.

I wouldn't be annoyed at all if I saw a stay on topic comment.

As far as I know the only comment that I've had deleted was in the AskMe question from the teenager who thought that a Subaru was too dorky for him and wanted to know what cool car he could buy. The mods were probably right to delete it.

In general, deleting comments probably helps when the problem is that one of the first commenters derailed the conversation to somewhere totally off-topic. Sometimes the thread is just un-fixable no matter how many comments they delete.

Right.

Well what LoriFLA just said rings true to me (so if this thread gets nuked, I will still have learned something wehey!) - a "stay on topic" comment might be a much better approach in a smaller community.

Comments that break the guidelines should be deleted, if only because if you don't delete them, people will keep making them. Like a 4 year old who keeps trying to leave the time out chair. If you make him sit down again 2, 3,4 times, sooner or later he realizes it's not worth breaking the rules.

The Television Without Pity forums do something I think is really interesting- if a thread starts getting too off topic and nasty (and keep in mind, threads over there are more specifically defined and aren't supposed to stray by design, which would be different than a place like Mecha or Metafilter), the moderator cleans up and then locks the thread for a few days.

I've seen some forums split threads when they get messy. My place isn't really built for that though I tried that approach once on one of those monster threads. Got kind of weird.

Deletion in the sense of 'removing the offending content' makes perfect sense, but I'm not so keen on the mechanics of deletion wherein it appears after the fact that the comment never existed in the first place. It can make for some proper confusement. The idea of having something saying "[this comment was deleted]" doesn't exactly feel right either, but at least you'd be a little bit more able to piece together what was going on.

I appreciate that moderation keeps the meta forums from turning into yahoo answers or youtube comments. But, I've had a couple of comments deleted, and it made me feel like not playing anymore.

Probably too hard to do, but I think what should happen when a comment is deleted is that it appears normally to whoever posted it, but is hidden from everyone else.

If you're only an occasional flamer, you'd probably never notice and wouldn't have your feelings hurt. Casual trolls would just think they're not getting any bites. Meanwhile the discussion would continue.

(Serious trolls would just keep checking each thread from a different account, but you can't do much about them anyway).

I think it's going to be impossible to talk about the topic generally here without it becoming a discussion of MeFi/Ask moderation ... so I'm going to close comments here. Sorry!

Maybe another thread can be opened that asks for examples of other site moderation practices and how well they do or don't work? That would be cool.