Flagged comments show as "helpful" when post was deleted but remain visible

Question

This could potentially be a duplicate of Why does flag marking as helpful/declined not always correlate with moderator action?, but the timing makes me think maybe not.

There was a lengthy discussion about an answer that was going nowhere, so I flagged all ~20 comments. As soon as I finished flagging, the answer was deleted, and when I went to my profile (instantly when the post was deleted), all my flags were listed as helpful, but when I look at the now-deleted answer, the comments remain.

Do comment flags get auto-marked as helpful if the post was deleted? Or did a moderator instantly review all of my flags as helpful without removing them and I just didn't notice?

Answer 1

Do comment flags get auto-marked as helpful if the post was deleted?

Yes, this is exactly what is happening. One of the reasons for this is that almost all users won't be able to see the post, and thus won't be able to see the comments. They do not require any further action from ♦ moderators, who can spend their valuable time elsewhere, fixing problems which are visible to most users.

Or did a moderator instantly review all of my flags as helpful without removing them and I just didn't notice?

Coincidentally, this is not possible for comment flags. The only way to mark a comment flag as helpful is by deleting or editing the comment (or, as you have noticed, by deleting the post).

Answer 2

Do comment flags get auto-marked as helpful if the post was deleted?

Yes.

That's pretty much it. Deleting comments is pretty low-priority if the post is deleted. I will generally look at any that are rude/abusive before I delete the post but if we're trying to give the OP some guidance on fixing their answer, the comments may be useful.

If you hover over the "helpful" text for each flag on your flag history page, you'll notice that the timestamp for the flag being marked helpful should be identical do the timestamp for the post deletion. We can't bulk delete comments, they have to be deleted one at a time, so the timestamps for each deletion if done manually would be different. That said, this hover text is the one place I've found where the hover time will still be relative time if it occurred in the last 24 hours, so it may just say "x hours ago" if it was recent... and it's not to-the-second accurate the way others are... so... maybe it's not so useful as proof...

So, other "proof": When it comes to comment flags, the only way to manually mark a flag as helpful is to delete the comment. We may come back and undelete it for some reason but that's time consuming and annoying. So, if you see a comment flag that's "helpful" but the comment is still around the system probably automated the flag handling, as in this case.