Recently a question was asked on the site namely : Did Hanuman actually fly to get herbs from a mountain?
This question being opinion based could not be answered in the answers section and thus some helpful members, including me thought of solving his doubt by adding comments. For example my comment attempted to explain that just the way birth and death certificates are historical records for governments, so also are the itihasas.
However today when I opened the site, I see that all the comments have been deleted. Here’s a screenshot for reference, showing 0 comments:
Now the guidelines for deleting comments are as follows:
Comments are temporary "Post-It" notes left on a question or answer. You should not expect them to be around forever. Once a clarification has been made, an edit added to the post to include new information, or the issue in the comment is otherwise resolved, it can be deleted. Additionally, any comment that violates the comment guidelines listed above or the Code of Conduct is subject to deletion
As we can see, when it is obsolete, an issue is resolved or the comment violates the code of conduct, then only it can be deleted.
Why most of the comments do not warrant deletion?
- As stated by above, most of the comments on the said question were in the nature of attempting to help the user. These comments were necessary from the perspective of explaining to the user his question, which could not be validly answered as per site rules. Moreover since the OP hadn’t acknowledged the comments we can not deem any issue to be resolved.
- Most of the comments were not rude in nature and were very well within the guidelines of the CoC. In fact as stated, they were meant to guide the user since it’s not possible to post an answer.
Accordingly for most of the comments deletion was not yet warranted
Yet all the comments have been deleted. I would like to know the reason for this? If it has happened inadvertently then I’d request their restoration.
(Technically deleting or not deleting doesn’t make a difference for the Stack Exchange server as comments are also always saved. It’s hard to imagine the comments were deleted to save space? Like once a comment has been posted, even after deleting it’s always there eating space, so where it doesn’t warrant deletion, why delete it?)
