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On a site I am a moderator on, I checked over a recently migrated question. One of the comments refers to another comment, which was presumably deleted prior to the migration. It appears that the other comment was related to the possibility of migration, but I have no way of knowing.

Can the deleted comments effectively be migrated with a migrated question? This way, moderators can better understand the history of the question.

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  • Not to say this wouldn't be useful sometimes, but you can just delete any comments whose context isn't clear. So I have my doubts this would be a high priority.
    – David Z
    Commented Jul 18, 2015 at 7:12
  • @DavidZ I agree; it's something of a niche issue.
    – HDE 226868
    Commented Jul 18, 2015 at 16:02

1 Answer 1

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You can see the question on the original site by adding ?noredirect=1 to its original URL. That won't let you see comments that were deleted before the migration unless you're a moderator on the source site. However, it will let you see comments that were deleted automatically by the migration process.

Comments that contain the name of the target site (I don't know exactly what the matching rules are) are deleted automatically as part of the migration process. This makes sense when they're just “This question should be migrated to Reindeer Stack Exchange”, but when they're more substantial and have replies, it's confusing. You can see those comments with ?noredirect. In your scenario, there's a good chance that this is what happened.

As a moderator, when I migrate a question, I never delete comments that are related to the migration, so that context is kept for the migration. I flag comments on the target site instead. This creates more work but ensures that the comment history remains visible, which is useful if the migration is contested or rejected.

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    A better solution that involves less work for the destination site moderators is to delete the comments before migration, and then undelete them on the original question (which you can do, because you are a moderator on the site where the question was originally asked). No one will be able to see the comments unless they add the ?noredirect=1 to the original URL, but that's OK, because they are almost entirely noise, unless someone is specifically needing that context.
    – Cody Gray
    Commented Jun 18, 2021 at 6:52

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