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Earlier today, a fellow moderator posted a comment. One "too chatty" flag was cast, and Community handled the flag and automatically deleted the comment. Some investigation turned up the fact that the reason only 1 flag was required to delete the comment was because it contained the word "accept". (Apparently there is a filter that lowers the required number of flags to auto-delete a comment when it thinks the comment is talking about accept rates.)

So, that mystery solved, I intended to undelete the comment. Unfortunately this particular comment has no undelete option! On the post's timeline, it shows that the flag was handled by Community, and that the comment was deleted by [name of the user who cast the "too chatty" flag]. When I view the deleted comment, it says "deleted by [name of the user who cast the "too chatty" flag] 12 hours ago". But there is no undelete button.

Is this the intended behavior? I can agree that moderators shouldn't be able to undelete comments that were deleted by their owners (I've been informed that this is the case) but if a comment was automatically deleted by the system (which can make mistakes) shouldn't we be able to fix it? (Not sure if this is a bug or a feature request, so I'm marking it as both; once I know I'll edit accordingly.)

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    @MichaelPetrotta Side note: perhaps the filter should disappear now that accept rates have gone the way of the dodo?
    – WendiKidd
    Dec 15, 2013 at 0:38
  • I'd agree, WendiKidd, its time has passed. Though it's not really doing a ton of damage at this point.
    – Michael Petrotta
    Dec 15, 2013 at 0:49
  • Or we could just take away the auto-delete on comments by a mod
    – Kevin
    Dec 15, 2013 at 0:57
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    @Kevin It's not just that it was a moderator's comment, though. It's that it was an automatic action taken by the Community user, and that should always be reversible. It seems to me that a better check to prevent undeletion would be (comment.owner == comment.deletion user), instead of what it seems to currently be, which is (comment.owner != me). Then we can't undelete self-deleted comments, but everything else is fair game.
    – WendiKidd
    Dec 15, 2013 at 1:05
  • Can you link to the comment in question?
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Dec 15, 2013 at 1:49
  • @AdamLear Certainly! Here you go :) And here's the flag timeline thingy
    – WendiKidd
    Dec 15, 2013 at 2:19
  • @WendiKidd Do you see an "undelete" link here?
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Dec 15, 2013 at 2:26
  • @AdamLear I do not.
    – WendiKidd
    Dec 15, 2013 at 2:27
  • @WendiKidd Okay, wasn't sure if that was mod-visible or dev only. Apparently the latter. :) Looking at a different post, it looks like we only show undelete links for comments removed by a moderator. I'm not 100% sure if that's by design... I'll check on it on Monday.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Dec 15, 2013 at 2:32
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    As an aside, I'm tempted to delete the reposted comment as well. It just rubs me the wrong way - we shouldn't be telling people to wait before accepting an answer. The checkmark can always be moved to a better answer later if needed, and asking people to wait 24 hours is a good way to reduce the number of accepted answers. If that was a solid idea, we likely would have a waiting period built into the software in the first place.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Dec 15, 2013 at 2:33
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    @AdamLear That's fair enough; I was mostly on a fact-finding mission, here :) I've left you a comment in chat with a bit more explanation! Thanks for looking into this further; I look forward to hearing what you discover! My thoughts on that is that it should probably check for (comment.owner == comment.deletionUser) instead... 1) If a fellow mod self-deletes their own comment, under the current system I could undelete it. 2) It seems like the goal was just to prevent mods from undeleting self-deleted comments. This accomplishes that without the extras :)
    – WendiKidd
    Dec 15, 2013 at 2:43
  • @Adam actually now that we don't show accept rate anymore, I think you should really remove it from the blacklist. (while keeping things like "what have you tried" :))
    – Shadow Wizard Strikes Back
    Dec 15, 2013 at 13:32
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    @shawizdoward I'm not sure that the "plz accept my answer" comments are also gone just because the visible accept rate is. We can query to check this, though.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Dec 15, 2013 at 14:56

1 Answer 1

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At the moment, this is intended behaviour. The "undelete" button is meant to be more like an "undo" for a moderator-initiated deletion.

I agree that this creates a weird edge case where some comments may be deleted via a single flag from a regular user, but I don't think it's a big deal. The comment that prompted this post probably didn't need to be left in the first place or didn't need to stay up for long anyway.

We can revisit this if it becomes a more frequent problem.

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