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When a question is migrated to a SE site that I'm not registered to, I can't claim ownership of my comments. An example question: The video file cannot be played

I registered only after the question was migrated and can't delete my comments. I always like to perform some garbage collection of noise comments made by me. (like on the example question)

Would it be possible to claim ownership of comments in this scenario? Is this a bug?

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    I know it's not a fix but you could flag the question for a moderator to delete the noise. As a mod on Programmers' I will look at recently migrated questions and delete "belongs on programmers" type comments.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Commented Mar 15, 2011 at 10:49
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    A while after this was asked, this was brought up again, with a newer staff response: Comment authors are not getting migrated
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Jan 8, 2021 at 6:14

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This currently isn't supported.

When comments are migrated, we do check if the owner exists on the destination site and assign ownership, as this is an easy lookup.

However, if the user didn't exist and then joins, the overhead needed to find any migrated comments isn't trivial. We feel that this overhead isn't merited, since comments are so lightweight.

(We've done many rounds of tuning for posts to make new account creation speedy for finding any migrated posts).

We might revisit assigning comment ownership, but for now, just flag the post for moderator attention asking for the comment to be removed. I've done this for your comment in question!

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  • "We might revisit assigning comment ownership" - so why tagging as status-bydesign? This kind of closing the seal over feature requests or bug reports. Either no status tag, or status-deferred should fit.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Dec 3, 2015 at 11:26
  • I don't know exactly how flagged comments are looked at, but can these (relatively small) number of cases be prioritised over less high-priority flags?
    – stevec
    Commented May 27, 2020 at 21:15
  • @stevec is there a particular post you're seeing that has issues?
    – Jarrod Dixon
    Commented May 27, 2020 at 21:22
  • @JarrodDixon not really, I wrote "why the downvote" on a question I posted, it got migrated and suddenly looked much more at home, and I felt like the comment looked like an admission of guilt of a bad question! :-) Given readers are often time poor, I think first impressions count, and such comments become misleading/distracting (I presume, of course, that the downvote was at least partly due to irrelevance to that forum). Here is the question. It's not overly important
    – stevec
    Commented May 27, 2020 at 21:25
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    @stevec I've deleted that comment. On sites with more moderators, flags can be handled quicker. Since Space only has a few volunteer mods, flag handling time can be more variable, depending on their valuable time! Perhaps we can look at this issue again.
    – Jarrod Dixon
    Commented May 27, 2020 at 21:37

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