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According to the comment everywhere privs page, deleted comments are 'gone for good':

What are comments?

Comments are temporary "Post-It" notes left on a question or answer. They can be up-voted (but not down-voted) and flagged, but do not generate reputation. There's no revision history, and when they are deleted they're gone for good.

However, the request to allow diamond mods to undelete deleted comments got implemented:

On a Question/Show page (not the mod dashboard), moderators can now quickly delete a comment without getting a prompt. After deletion, the standard "deleted content" styles will show the just-deleted comment, along with the "undelete" link.

So, the privilege page is kind of lying right now. Could we make it tell the truth?:

What are comments?

Comments are temporary "Post-It" notes left on a question or answer. They can be up-voted (but not down-voted) and flagged, but do not generate reputation. There's no revision history, and only moderators can delete and undelete them.

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  • 1
    guess it's time for a feature request to show deleted comments to 10k users
    – CodesInChaos
    Oct 6, 2013 at 22:17
  • 8
    Isn't moderator undelete just to allow the delete everything + undelete what's good work flow. Nothings actually expected to come back from deletion
    – Richard Tingle
    Oct 6, 2013 at 22:23

2 Answers 2

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To add to random's answer, comment undelete is a feature designed to make comment moderation easier, not harder. A common pattern is for a post to collect dozens of chatty, off-topic, tangential, jokey comments. When flagged, moderators used to have a choice between deleting all comments or picking and choosing. If by some chance there were one or two useful comments, it required a many more mouse clicks with a corresponding chance of mistakes to leave them.

With the undelete option, moderators can remove unwanted comments quickly and restore the hidden gems. Plus if a comment is mistakenly deleted, the error can be fixed. It's a feature to make the moderator's job a bit easier.

Comment moderation is a thankless job already, so I see no reason to provide another vector for gripping. We are looking into ways to help comments age gracefully. (I like the MacArthur mandate: "Old comments never die; they just fade away.") I'd also like to encourage users to incorperate comments into posts either by editing them in or by creating a new answer. We do not expect undeletion of comments to be common or asked for.

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It is still telling the truth. Chances of a comment being undeleted are pretty much nil.

"Gone for good" drives home the point that you shouldn't cling onto them. That if it was golden material, it would be in an answer.

Moderators aren't the only users with the ability to delete comments either. You can delete your own comment or gang up with other like minded cleaners and flag a comment into dust.

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  • 2
    Still there is a difference between deleting and hiding.
    – CodesInChaos
    Oct 6, 2013 at 22:16
  • 2
    Hiding suggests secrecy. We just don't care for comments, so they're deleted
    – random
    Oct 6, 2013 at 22:17
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    Hiding suggests secrecy. We don't care for answers, so they're deleted.
    – Cole Tobin
    Oct 6, 2013 at 23:53
  • Really? This probably won't happen, so... we're just going to say it can't be done?
    – user206222
    Oct 7, 2013 at 0:49
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    Not just mods can delete comments. But also that all this fixation about comments is making certain users put so much emphasis on them that if they get deleted they ragequit because they think it's sacrosanct. Deleting comments is not the same as deleting answers.
    – random
    Oct 7, 2013 at 1:06

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