Tricki
a repository of mathematical know-how

Deleting comments

Deleting comments

I accidentally made the same comment twice. Is there a way to delete it? I couldn't see how.

I'm not sure if there is, but I've got the power to do so and will do it this time. Alex or Olof will have to decide whether they can introduce a facility for people to delete their own comments.

A related issue is whether minor comments should be deleted once they have been dealt with. For example, someone might comment that they didn't follow a certain step, and the author might then realize that there had been a typo. We don't necessarily want that correspondence to last for ever – though perhaps it doesn't matter too much if it does.

It would be good to decide on a policy for comment deletion. It's not clear to me what the best solution would be. Should one be allowed to delete one's own comment even if other people have replied to it?

I think having minor comments might be a good idea, though it does mean that the history of the article can't be followed completely accurately. One could state in the policy that whatever edit results from a minor comment should be mentioned in the revision log, though one would still not have access to the complete information.

There's also a discussion going on on another forum post about whether we should have discussion pages, which is not unrelated to this topic. I would be interested to hear if there is some kind of consensus as to how we should do these things.

I think deleting our own comments is a must.

For example, I made an observation in the form of an inline comment in an article by Tao ("adding and substracting"), and he quickly fixed the problem. Now we have a "false" inline comment disturbing readers in the middle of a good paragraph. I thought the main purpose of inline comments was a dynamical one, and I'd definitely like to erase it (and maybe Tao should have the same power to do so, having corrected the issue!).

Hi

First, to ensure some kind of integrity you should only let registered people do stuff here. If someone is willing enough to add something to the Tricki he/she is surely willing enough to register. Btw, your forum just got spammed (search for "essay").

Second, an idea to solve "solved" comments, might be to "disable" them. A comment that is disabled is sort of "folded in", so that only the subject (or a shortened version of it), the author's name and the date is shown in a single line. An arrow is present to click on to "fold out" the comment, if someone really wants to read it. Like they do it on Blogger or Digg. This can be done either by a moderator or the user himself. The replies to the comment should be minimized as well.

As for really deleting, this should only be done by the staff here. One could integrate the option to "flag a comment for deletion", so that a user can flag his (and only his) comment for a moderator to delete it. This can be used in case of double-posting.

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