Why does a posted comment seemingly disappear into thin air without any error message?

[Steffen Opel _Utoolity_]

I've tried to post a comment a few times on Jeremy's answer to Can you please clarify your migration algorithm/policy?

It seemingly posted correctly, i.e. the UI displayed it properly as a comment on his answer, yet refreshing the browser revealed that it had disappeared.

Besides not being able to comment in the first place, it is obviously fairly nasty to not even indicate this in anyway, thereby misleading users and possibly even generating the impression on return that content has been deleted after the fact.

I have been able to submit permanent comments on other content (e.g. on How can I watch a tag?), so this seems to be an edge case, albeit a highly critical one?

[Sam Hall · Accepted solution]

Ah. Wait. I think your reply might have got caught up in the spam filter for some reason. 

It has got through now and I'm seeing it showing under Jeremy's reponse now. Do you see it too?

[Steffen Opel _Utoolity_]

Thanks Sam, I'm seeing both of them too now (think I might even have tried three times).

The usability here is obviously not ideal (to say the least), because I had no indication whatsoever that my comment might be in moderation still (plus the identically phrased answer I accidentally posted first had still been visible - maybe that triggered the spam filter though?) - guess this leads to How can I delete my own content? in turn ;)

[Sam Hall]

Yes. I think underlying usability issue merits a seperate discussion, now that we found why your specific post disappeared, so I created a new question asking for improvement:

Can there be better feedback on responses awaiting moderation?

If you are happy with that, we could mark this question as answered since we worked out the 'why?' and continue the discussion/request for Atlassian to improve on the new question.

What do you think?

[Sam Hall]

<Edit: The cause was the reply getting caught in the spam quarantine.>