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In reviewing answers, I occasionally come across people asking new questions in an answer to an existing question. Usually, you can safely flag these as non-answers for the moderators to remove.

However, sometimes I see a non-answer (usually of the variety "Have you solved this yet?"), where someone provides useful information in the comments on that answer. I'm loath to delete useful content from the site, but these non-answers don't really belong where they are.

For examples, see this answer and this one. Admittedly, these aren't the best out there, but you can at least see what I'm talking about.

Should I still flag these as non-answers or just let them be?

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If the comments clarify the answer, edit the nugget of gold back into the main post from the comments and flag the comments as noise.

Otherwise, just flag the whole non-answer and move along.

It's in a comment, think nothing more of it. Obviously the person who posted it there didn't.

If it was of any real value, they would have posted it as a proper answer.

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    +1 - but personally, I often post a comment hoping that someone will add some extra detail to their answer. Editing the answer isn't something I'm confident enough to do. After all, a lot of these comments seem to provoke "how dare you" and "you're a moron" responses as it is. If I'm missing something, I don't want to be accused of vandalising someones answer. It doesn't mean I don't care about the comment - it's still something I wrote on a public site - just that I don't always think another only-slightly-different answer is the right approach.
    – user136873
    Feb 23, 2011 at 23:46

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