If a comment is deleted, is the user notified?

August 16, 2005 7:03 PM

If a comment is deleted, is the user notified? I commented in the roach question, and now it's gone. Is it because I used a bad word?
posted by hellbient to Bugs at 7:03 PM (11 comments total)

i put this in "bugs" because i didn't know where else to put it.
posted by hellbient at 7:05 PM on August 16, 2005

I just noticed two posts (not mine) go from the "going to Texas to protest" question too. They were flamebait though, so good riddance.
posted by wackybrit at 7:09 PM on August 16, 2005

I usually email people if I remove their comments. I don't remember taking anything out of the roach thread. What did you say?
posted by jessamyn at 7:18 PM on August 16, 2005

Yes, an AskMe comment of mine was deleted today. I was emailed with a message by the deleter and a copy of the comment.
posted by Gyan at 7:18 PM on August 16, 2005

it was a joke about loving cockroaches or something. Actually, the whole thread sucks with a dumb hypothetical chatty question followed by people mostly making jokes about cockroaches.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 7:44 PM on August 16, 2005

I'm not heartbroken that it was deleted, and yeah, silly thread, but I don't see the reason it was deleted.
If I may repeat, i said our world would turn to sh*t without cockroaches. That we should try to become more like them, or learn from them. They eat our garbage. They evolve quickly - remember when they didn't have wings?
It wasn't delivered without humor, but I wasn't kidding. And it's all true. Maybe I should've mentioned it's inspiration was Joe Coleman.

In any case, if this happens again, do i just assume it was deleted?
posted by hellbient at 8:47 PM on August 16, 2005

Hellbient sounds as if he or she might've offered a reasonable answer. It's a pity I'll never know.

If the entire thread is shit, croak the entire thread. Meantime, stop shooting holes in the stuff I'm trying to read. Hamfisted pruning does more harm than good.
posted by trondant at 12:21 AM on August 17, 2005

It wasn't at all such a bad question, bar the misspelt title tag and slightly all-over-the-place wording. I keep wondering about things like this from time to time and it makes for good discussion. Hypothetical isn't necessarily dumb and/or chatty. I know there's some friction here, though, I've had a hypothetically slanted AskMe of mine deleted.

But I'd always make a stand for hypothetical question about supposed organism redundancy over the next "Someone peed on my iPod and I can't get it to work".
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 12:30 AM on August 17, 2005

Hamfisted pruning does more harm than good.

Care to scale the rhetoric back? We're talking about three or four jokey comments about cockroaches. Every comment box on ask mefi says plainly "Please limit comments to answers or help in finding an answer. Wisecracks don't help people find answers."

The problem is that while hypothetical questions are on everyone's mind from time to time, it seems the usefulness of answers is directly related to how likely a hypothetical a situation is. So the concrete hypotheticals are usually good ("if I was knitting a cap, what yarn should I use if it's for...") but when they aim into fantasy territory ("say the president wanted to blow up the moon, how do you think things would change...") the answers are often more jokes than anything serious.

This cockroach question is a fairly impossible situation and resulted in a lot of jokey comments that were flagged and I removed because they weren't offering much useful info.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 1:58 AM on August 17, 2005

Yes, an AskMe comment of mine was deleted today. I was emailed with a message by the deleter and a copy of the comment.

Ditto.
posted by fixedgear at 3:00 AM on August 17, 2005

I guess my point is that I wasn't joking...
posted by hellbient at 7:26 AM on August 17, 2005