Should moderators be able to undelete any comment, including self-deletions?

Question

Moderators were granted the ability to undelete comments, primarily to make cleaning up long comment threads more efficient. The idea was for the moderator to purge all comments, then selectively undelete those deemed worthy of continued existence.

The moderator UI only allows moderators to undelete a comment deleted by a current moderator. Moderators cannot undelete comments deleted by community flags (including single-flag deletions), or by the comment author themselves through the UI^{[Note 1]}.

The system does not enforce this on the backend, so user scripts exist to allow moderators to undelete any comment — including those deleted by non-moderators through whatever code path (including self-deleted comments).

An example use of this is a moderator undeleting self- or flag-deleted comment(s) in a long chain, where the missing comment(s) make the rest of the thread hard to follow, or otherwise result in the loss of content with lasting value.

1. Should moderators be able to undelete any comment?
2. Should this ability be added to the moderator tools UI?
3. Or should the current UI behaviour be enforced server-side?

Related Q & A:

• Allow moderators to undelete the comments deleted after being flagged by a single user
• Can't undelete a comment which was automatically deleted by Community
• How do comments work?

---

_{Note 1: Main on-site moderator UI only. There is a separate page where universal deletion is possible, but it is unclear if this is by design — it is certainly not well-known among moderators.}

Answer 1

I think moderators should be able to undelete, in addition to comments deleted by diamond moderators or the Community bot which moderators are already able to undelete:

• comments deleted by a single flag (able to be deleted by one flagging user because they contain some keyword such as "fuck" or "accepting");
• comments deleted by multiple flags (3+(comment score/3) flags (rounded up) needed);
• comments deleted by ex-moderators who no longer have diamonds;

but moderators should NOT be able to undelete:

• comments self-deleted by the person who originally posted the comment.

---

The rationale for this is as follows:

• The power to remove any comment permanently from the site, even if moderators and the community find it a worthwhile comment, shouldn't rest in the hands of any user with 15+ rep who's able to flag. The single-flag deletion of comments has been problematic on sites where the linguistic discussion of swearwords is on-topic, or where confirmatory comments from the OP are used to determine a post's duplicate status. I imagine it could also be problematic if, for example, the issue of a community being "accepting" or not was being discussed on meta.

• If a comment is deleted by multiple flagging users, at least there's a little more existence of checks and balances here than for comments deleted by just one. Still, if someone wants to get rid of a comment they don't like, it's trivially easy to whip up a couple of socks to 15 reputation and use this trio of accounts to flag away happily. The fact that this can happen without oversight is bad enough, but at least allow it to be reversed by diamond moderators if it does happen!

• Comments deleted by moderators can usually be undeleted by other moderators. Why should this stop being the case if the deleting moderator loses their diamond? If anything, it's more likely that an ex-moderator's decisions should be reversed than a current moderator's. Sometimes (rarely) a moderator is forcibly removed due to poor behaviour, which might include being overly heavy-handed with deletion.

• The original poster of a comment, on the other hand, should retain the right to delete it absolutely, so that it can't be undeleted by others. Maybe a comment contains some identifying information that the OP doesn't want to be left available on the site - and, unlike posts, comments cannot be anonymised. If you posted a comment and you want to delete it, fair play to you. (That goes for whether you're a moderator or not, by the way. Currently, comments self-deleted by a diamond mod can be undeleted by any other diamond mod on the same site.)

I accept that many of the potential scenarios I've outlined above are extremely unlikely; however, it can still be considered that they might happen sometime, somewhere. I don't see any particular advantage in disallowing mods to undelete comments from ex-mods, or flag-deleted comments, but there could potentially be disadvantages, even if unlikely ones.

---

So my proposal is:

To decide whether or not a comment can be undeleted by a diamond bearer, rather than checking for "does the deleter have a diamond?", check for "does the deleter have the same user ID as the commenter?" instead.

Or alternatively:

Rather than running either of the above checks individually, check for "does the deleter have the same user ID as the commenter AND not have a diamond?".

This would allow current mods to undelete their own comments, but disallow undeletion of other comments deleted by the original commenter (including if that commenter is an ex-mod).

Answer 2

Note: Moderators can, currently, undelete any comment. However, the ability to do so is, for some comments, only exposed in the stock user interface when looking at all comments made by a user, rather than when viewing deleted comments on posts. That user interface shows only a list of the user's comments (i.e. it doesn't show any of the context surrounding the comment).

Moderators should have, and already do have, the ability to undelete any comment

That doesn't mean that undeleting a comment should be done without thought and due consideration for the author, the community, etc.

Moderators are exception handlers. Not having the ability to undelete some comments means that there's a set of comments, which can be identified by a program written in advance, which will never have an exceptional situation occur where undeleting those comments is a good option. In my opinion, it's not possible to identify in advance a class of comments which will never have an exception.

Moderators are expected to exercise judgement in their actions. That an ability exists doesn't mean that it should be used for no reason. Moderators are elected specifically to exercise their judgement as to what is best to do in situations which can't be programmatically determined in advance. Thus, moderators should be given the ability to exercise that judgement (i.e. should have the ability to undelete all comments).

As with all moderator actions, there is always the option to appeal to Stack Exchange's Community Managers if there is a belief that the moderator's actions were inappropriate.

A sticking point for many people is the undeletion of comments deleted by the comment's author:
Moderators currently have the ability to undelete any user's posts. They exercise judgement as to what is best for the community when considering if a post should be undeleted. This includes weighing the author's clear desire to delete the content balanced against the content's value to the community. Comments are, to a significant extent, quite similar. It is, however, much more rare that a comment's benefit to the community would outweigh the author's desire to delete it. However, particularly on Meta sites, where significant discussion happens in comments, there are entire discussions which could become quite difficult to understand if a user chose to delete all of their comments. While a large portions of those discussion can, and should be, handled by just deleting the other comments which are now difficult to understand, it's impossible to say that there will never be a case where the best choice for the community is to undelete the user's comments, potentially editing them to remove an unnecessary portion which was what the user was primarily concerned about (but couldn't edit, due to the 5 minute limit on editing).

Legality

As with all content which is contributed to Stack Exchange, users don't have a right to delete it. That they don't have that right is very explicitly stated in the Terms of Service. They've contributed that content to the community. In some cases, the community's interest in the content outweighs the user's desire to delete it. Judging when that may occur is something only a human can do, which is one of the things moderators exist to do.

Right to disassociate themselves from content:
Under the CC BY-SA licenses, people have the right to request that attribution to them be removed from the content which they contribute (a process commonly called "dissociation"). The ability for users to be able to make such requests and have the requests acted upon needs to be maintained. However, requesting dissociation is substantially different than just deleting the content. Just deleting something definitely doesn't automatically indicate the user's desire for dissociation.

For other content (i.e. questions and answers), users can use the "Contact/Contact Us" link at the bottom of every page to request dissociation. Some people also use the unofficial route of raising a flag to request that happen, which moderators can escalate to the Community Managers. There's no reason that a user can't already use the same process to request dissociation from their comment.

Current technical limitations:
Unlike questions and answers, the system doesn't have an automatic method to allow Community Managers to remove the user's name from association with a comment. As a result of that lack of capability, when dissociation has been requested, a very, very rare thing, the comment has just been deleted, presumably by a Community Manager. Unfortunately, just deleting the comment doesn't actually comply with the CC BY-SA license, because the content is still distributed to some people (moderators) under some conditions (note: showing moderators the associated comment may be valid under other licenses granted to Stack Exchange for the content in some versions of the Terms of Service). So, if there is going to be actual compliance with CC BY-SA, then the technical capability to actually dissociate the user from the comment needs to be developed. However, this current technical limitation doesn't mean that moderators should be unable to undelete the comments where dissociation has not been requested.

Answer 3

Yes, I think elected moderators should be able to undelete any deleted comment.

Moderating comments is already very time-consuming, and anything that makes them easier to moderate is useful for moderators, and for those who flag moderators to moderate comments.

As a moderator of two sites I do not recall any instance where I wanted to undelete a comment and could not, so I am not sure that the current tools need any modification in this regard. However, if any change is made, then I think it should only be to simplify the circumstance when moderators can undelete comments to be always.

Answer 4

https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment

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

I’m going to take the unpopular position here and say no, we shouldn’t expand a moderator’s ability to undelete comments. “Comments are intended to be ephemeral” cuts both ways. Moderators can see deleted comments, so if it was truly that important that the information in that comment be preserved, the moderator can take appropriate steps to incorporate it into a post, leave a comment that is more obviously relevant and less likely to get deleted, or whatever is appropriate.

If we find that unsatisfactory, then comments need to be promoted to be equal to the other content on the site and we should give up telling people they shouldn’t care if their comments are deleted because they’re intended to be temporary. I think it would be worthwhile to completely rethink how we accomplish the necessary discussion about posts that comments provide, taking into account everything we’ve learned from the existing system. The energy and resources involved in moderating comments is currently ridiculous in my opinion.

I would not support blocking scripts from undeleting comments unless there is a vulnerability that needs to be fixed. My position is basically that we should stop anything other than critical fixes to the existing system that we’ve outgrown, and start designing a better system to provide the ability for a community to collaborate on posts.

Answer 5

Should moderators be able to undelete any comment?

Moderators should be able to undelete comments if there's a clear indication that doing so would be beneficial. What is the clear indication: an ongoing back and forth that hasn't resulted in some sort of conclusion about the post they are posted under (this specifically excludes meta sites)

If that conclusion comes in the form of an edit, closure, deletion, etc. then they don't need to undelete it.

Now, comments deleted by community flags or by the authors themselves... I don't see these as a problem that props up frequently. If we are going to do this, it should be within a specific timeframe, like less than 7 days old, to give time to participants to read the comment and do appropriated response. But otherwise, I don't see this as something moderators should be able to do.

Maybe we need information about how frequent this is and how it's being used. Someone with sick SQL skillz can shed light on this?