Should community article writers be able to delete comments of others?

[#1]

Greetings, community!

When a community article writer posts content, they willingly share their ideas, experiences, concerns, fun topics, etc. to engage with other people. 

This format is a great way for Atlassian team members and marketplace partners to share new / upcoming features and products...and to solicit feedback.  And for everyone else, perhaps to share something they solved in a new and unique way with Atlassian tools.  Or, ideas on how their teams collaborate.  Or, well...just about anything within the rules of engagement guidelines for all, and for vendor partners in particular.  The possibilities are practically endless!  These articles provide excellent value to the people who choose to come here to engage, learn, and participate in the community.  Thank you, article writers!

And, when the writer posts the article, they have a choice to make.  Perhaps they decide not to support response comments to the article, and so disable that feature.  The very act of posting an article is demonstrating healthy vulnerability, presenting one's self, ideas, etc., flaws and all, for others to engage with.  Accepting feedback from a bunch of people you do not know can be scary.  Yet, almost everyone appears to willingly accept such feedback...leading to better participation and collaborative building upon ideas.  And for the article writer, helps foster trust, creativity and innovation of their shared thoughts, and improve human connection to other community members.  (There is an edge case here, where Atlassian moderators may halt conversation by "locking" a thread for various reasons.)

Awesome, right?  Well, there appears to be a little used feature which seems to quash open engagement of ideas on articles: comment deletion. 

It seems article writers can arbitrarily delete a response comment from another person, with no review, notification, or anything.  Just gone.  I have personally observed such deletions, leading me to ponder: is the app broken, did I not actually post the thing I think I posted, etc.?  Why do article writers have this ability?  If they did not want response comments, they could disable them for the article.  And, there is already a mechanism in place to manage questionable content: report to moderators.  Thus, comment deletion by authors seems both superfluous and to impede open, collaborative, community engagement.

What are your thoughts on this; should article writers have this ability?  Thanks for your feedback and ideas, community!

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski]

Hello @Bill Sheboy 

Hope you’re doing well.

I’ll be honest, I’m a bit split on this topic.

On one hand, I’m very much in favor of free speech and not a fan of heavy moderation. Blocking comments often feels unnatural to me. A lot of the time, people who come in with attitude can be dealt with by simply answering them properly instead of silencing them.

On the other hand, there are also plenty of people who act like keyboard warriors and add nothing useful at all. They are not there for discussion, they are there to spread hate, provoke others, and waste time. That is the point where I understand why moderation has its place.

So for me, it is not completely one side or the other. I support open discussion, but I also understand that without any limits, some conversations just become toxic and pointless. That’s why I’d say I’m somewhere in between.

[Liz Nixon]

Hi @Bill Sheboy 

Great question! Having not posted any articles, I learned a lot just now and I want to thank you for this. It does seem that authors having the ability to delete comments indeed impedes open and collaborative community engagement, and is superfluous given the 'report to moderators' feature.

I just reviewed the comment moderation documentation you provided, it unfortunate that Atlassian does not to provide feedback on the action they do or do not take in response. 

Perhaps the article author can submit a request to delete a comment, and provide a reason (from a predefined list) that is then submitted to the moderators for review. If the outcome is to delete the comment, then it would be easy for a notification to be sent to the individual who commented, since the reason provided is already stored as part of the process.

I don't think that allowing the author to delete comments on their own and without any oversight is a good way to go.

[Darryl Lee]

I didn't even know that there was a Delete Comments option.

As someone who comments a lot, I don't like it, especially since there's a Report function, as you pointed out.