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Cleaning up long chains of comments is a pain in the butt. Major sort. It just takes too many damn clicks, with all the confirmation and flag reason picking dialogs.

Please implement bulk operations for comments (for moderators), maybe like so (crude mockup):

enter image description here

Comments taken from here; no statement about comment quality intended.

Note there is a somewhat similar question, but the proposal here is to add this to regular pages, not (only) to queues.

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    Just aligning the delete links in some way so that you wouldn't have to search them in every comment would make mass removal much easier.
    – Mad Scientist
    Aug 14 '14 at 20:03
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    Couldn't you just purge all and selectively undelete?
    – hichris123
    Aug 14 '14 at 20:11
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    It's worth noting that moderators have the ability to purge all comments on a post, and selectively undelete comments. I for one wonder what this would add that the two existing modes of cleaning comments don't already offer? (Purge then undelete, or delete individual comments.) Other than the comments perhaps disappearing for a moment, I get the feeling it wouldn't really add much... but maybe I'm missing something obvious? (Edit: I see @hichris123 beat me to mentioning this.)
    – user
    Aug 14 '14 at 20:12
  • @MichaelKjörling So there are 20 comments, 10 have to stay and 10 have to go. Both existing "solutions" require 10+ actions (rather, 20+ if you follow the "leave a paper trail" paradigm).
    – Raphael
    Aug 15 '14 at 7:13
  • That seems like a contrived use case, honestly; I don't think I've ever seen a comment thread where there's a 50/50 mix of comments that should stay and comments that should go. But maybe it's more of a problem on some sites I don't frequent that much.
    – user
    Aug 15 '14 at 8:12
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    @MichaelKjörling On Computer Science I regularly clean up comments below posts with two (or more) problems, only one (or some) of which have been addressed yet. The corresponding comments are now obsolete while those addressing unresolved issues have to stay. (50/50 is the worst case, obviously)
    – Raphael
    Aug 15 '14 at 8:55
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+50

This makes a lot of sense, and I can see how it could be a time saver for Mods. My suggestion would be to make it a little more similar to other sites, like YouTube, E-Mail providers, etc. where you have a lot of objects you want to perform the same action on. How you could accomplish that would be to leave the check marks as shown in your question, but then at the top of the comment string there would be a drop down menu of possible actions, and a button saying Apply To Selected.

If there are few options (under 4) then specific buttons for each of the actions would be even quicker.

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  • I dislike these dropdowns; with them it takes three clicks to perform the action(s), direct links take one. Hence links are preferable unless there are too many.
    – Raphael
    Dec 17 '14 at 17:09

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