what's up with comments being moved to chat for this question?

Question

On this question: What happens to a Ghost when the Possessed creature polymorphs?, the top-voted answer has several warts: it cites multiple contradictory rulings without a clear way to reconcile them, it makes the citations in a weird way (it cites other rpg.stackexchange answers citing the actual game designers), and the top-level answer claims (possibly incorrectly) that there is no rules-as-written answer and it should be left to DM discretion.

The usual way that we resolve this is we post a comment saying "hey, this answer could be improved if you..." I went to do this, but there was a message from mxyzplk saying comments should only be posted in a chat.

Chat comments are designed to be low-visibility. I went and posted my comment in the chat, but I doubt that it will be noticed or acted on.

The weird thing is that only five comments were moved to the chat -- it hardly seems like the sort of dogpile where moderation tools would be necessary.

mxyzplk: what's going on here? Why don't you want me to post a comment on this answer?

Answer 1

There were 11 comments on that. Some early ones were constructive and positively acted on by the author; those were fine, but then a bunch came in basically chatting about their personal thoughts on Crawford versus Mearls rather than attempting to help the post with its errors. So they were moved to chat.

A couple comments came in after the move-to-chat which were minor suggestions. I wouldn't have removed them, but they were very minor suggestions that should probably have just been direct edits instead of comments… so in the context of having just cleaned up a bunch of noisy comments, I can also see the motive in removing these little suggestions. (What with different mods having different workflows and different takes on minor judgement calls like these.)

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As a suggestion for improving a comment's chance to survive a potential “man, I just swept this floor!” moderator reaction, make it substantial and specific and really need the author's engagement. If a comment is clearly doing good work best done with a comment, it's more likely to be left to its work. If it's something like (for one example of a removed comment, not picking on the example though) just suggesting clarifying who MM and JC are, then it'll have a better and more productive life as an edit to the answer.

Answer 2

Overall that question and its answers have 6 flags and 24 deleted comments on them, so it's pretty high on the scale of requiring unacceptable amounts of mod intervention in the first place. I had to come move comments to chat in the first place because everyone was being too chatty. Once comments are moved to chat, to me that means keep further discussion in chat. Other comments can't be migrated into the chat so the only choice remaining is delete them or leave them. I chose to delete V2Blast's 2 additional comments after that point (why 2?) and had to add another comment saying "no really use the chat" to make the point that you should use the chat once the comments have already had to be cleaned up. You can ping the OP from chat just as well as you can from a comment. While I'm sure those comments were great and actionable and the most on topic comments ever, on Q&As where there's runaway discussion my experience tells me it's likely it's going to continue - those 2 comments, then more people responding - and yay, we get to clean them up again.

Once comments are moved to chat, use the chat. You may not think you're being part of the problem, but there's a problem when there's enough comments it has to happen.