Forum:Comments Left Inappropriately As Answers To A Question

Question

[Matt Shirley]

I've seen countless comments on Biostars in the vein of:

Please leave this as a comment on the answer to your question instead of a new answer to your question.

How difficult would it be to provide a mechanism for Biostars moderators to move a user's inappropriately placed answer as a comment to the appropriate answer? Is this something that is on the development roadmap? Is there a development roadmap? If not, would our time be better spent developing an interface to reduce the need for this type of passive moderation?

[Josh Herr]

This is an important issue that has come up before. Changes have been made to help, but I continually see this happen. Unfortunately I see this a lot in new users who post additional information as an answer -- and I see this as a problem because some people may avoid looking at a question if they think it is already answered and some new user questions go unanswered.

Answer 1

[Istvan Albert]

The functionality does exist, it is called 'reparenting', moving a post to a different parent and as such changing the type of it (answer->comment) etc. It is currently disabled.

It is not on mainly because there are some challenges with figuring out the proper interface and how to undo this action. Perhaps my original design was overly ambitious - and it could be be simplified to just moving answers to comments.

[Matt Shirley]

Thanks for this answer. My hidden agenda was to think about how I could contribute this feature if it didn't exist, but it sounds like you've thought about it!

[Istvan Albert]

the main challenges are with the user interface - how to specify where the answer should move to?

A drag and drop would be ideal but that needs javascript/jquery knowledge that I always need to re-learn. This interface has not yet been written. If you can come up with a generic html UI (unrelated to Biostar) that say triggers a callback when one html div (with an id) is dragged into another then that would be a big step forward in getting this feature working