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If I flag a comment such as "Thanks, that is the answer to my question" with "No longer needed", it will be deleted automatically without any mods looking at it. However, this could be really harmful if done on questions with no answer, such as this one and this one have no acceptance, just comments that both include "thanks" in them and I could delete with no effort, messing up the duplicate marking.

Stack Exchange developers, can you please turn this off for either all questions on this site, or those tagged with ?

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    Someone was using a bot a few months ago to auto-flag them. It caused considerable harm
    – Valorum
    May 19, 2019 at 14:36

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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No. Be careful when flagging instead.

We know that story-id questions are often not accepted formally, and "thanks it's that" comments are our only trace of acceptance. It's the responsibility of the flagger to make sure the comment is really obsolete, and even when the answer got checkmarked, it's not that much of a problem to leave those around. This is SFF, we're not overwhelmed by thanks comments, and they don't really cause harm.

It's a different situation on SO, and the most active sites of the network, which is why that automation was put in place to begin with... But each site has some leeway to do how they want. SFF is fine with those, let's keep 'em.

So once again, please think twice about flagging those. And if you know someone going on a "thank you" hunt, try to reach out to them to explain how that's possibly harmful. If needed, raise a mod-flag.

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    It's pretty hard for anyone to tell who's going on a "thank you" hunt, unless they boast about it in chat. Even for mods, since we don't see flags that are automatically approved by the system.
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    May 19, 2019 at 14:54
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    @Randal'Thor you don't? Well that sounds like a feature-request to bring up on main Meta (of it hasn't been done before)
    – Jenayah
    May 19, 2019 at 14:57
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    Well, we can see them if we go hunting for them, e.g. in the flag history of a specific post. They don't appear in the mod dashboard for pending flags (by design, since the whole point of automatically approving flags is not to bother mods with them).
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    May 19, 2019 at 14:58

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