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A useful kind of comment we get on both questions and answers frequently goes as follows:

Related: [link description](link target)

or, less helpfully:

[Related](link target)

When this is, in fact, related material these comments are very useful to anyone interested in the question and answer. Unfortunately, our current system is to leave these sitting as comments for years, because that just feels like the natural place for them.

Comments should get deleted, where possible, and there's no real record of them once they have been deleted. I think it would be good if these sorts of helpful links, where helpful (as judged by upvote quantity and not being a joke), could be edited into the body of post they ride on as a footnote.

While nothing stops us from doing this at present, I was hoping for community approval before I start mass-editing old material as I come across it.

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    \$\begingroup\$ I feel I should point out - I downvoted, but I think this was worth asking, and well asked, and I don't even disagree with the idea in principle. There's a fair number of questions on the site with a "Related Reading" section, and I think it can be a good thing to do. I downvoted because I think editing other people's posts in this particular way isn't a good idea, especially older posts. \$\endgroup\$
    – Miniman
    Apr 19, 2017 at 4:56
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    \$\begingroup\$ As a side note, this is a problem with presenting a course of action in a question, rather than asking whether something is a good idea and having yes/no answers - it forces people to vote (dis)agreement on the question. \$\endgroup\$
    – Miniman
    Apr 19, 2017 at 4:56
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Miniman Yeah, but in this case I did mean this specific course of action and I wanted a vote now, so I think it worked out. Nothing stops you from posting a related discussion question if you'd like; my situation this time was such that I have a bunch of tabs open where I might have done this but instead I didn't. So the downvotes were all helpful to me ;) \$\endgroup\$
    – Please stop being evil
    Apr 19, 2017 at 5:41
  • \$\begingroup\$ We actually had someone doing this a while back, and we asked them to stop and reversed it where we could. \$\endgroup\$
    – doppelgreener
    Apr 19, 2017 at 12:02

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Related links are one of the good uses of comments, and we don't delete them.

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    \$\begingroup\$ But if we moved the comments into posts then we could delete them. Clearly not a popular idea, though ^^; \$\endgroup\$
    – Please stop being evil
    Apr 19, 2017 at 4:07
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    \$\begingroup\$ @thedarkwanderer A benefit of having them in comments is that nobody can touch them, except the owner or a mod. Stuff in posts, meanwhile, can be removed by nearly anyone. They're actually safer in comments. \$\endgroup\$
    – SevenSidedDie
    Apr 19, 2017 at 4:26
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    \$\begingroup\$ Yes! I, for one, enjoy related-link-freefalling (clicking all of them and just reading everything until you decide that's enough of productively wasting your time). \$\endgroup\$
    – daze413
    Apr 19, 2017 at 4:36
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    \$\begingroup\$ Does the system keep them in the "Linked" section in the sidebar if the comment gets deleted? \$\endgroup\$
    – Eidolon108
    Apr 19, 2017 at 4:53
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Eidolon108 No - it used to, but they fixed it. \$\endgroup\$
    – Miniman
    Apr 19, 2017 at 4:58

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