Feature request: notification about my deleted comment

Question

Feature request. As a user, I want to get a notification when a comment of mine has been deleted by a moderator. Ideally, I also would like to get a short explanation for the deletion in case it's not obvious. It's obvious for example when a moderator has deleted a whole discussion which went offtopic, and/or that moderator left a comment already why it has been deleted directly in the thread.

Please notice that I am aware how comments work and what their purpose is. I am also aware of the reasons why moderators may delete comments in general (see e.g. this heavily cited answer, but also all the answers in the linked threads below). My feature request still stands. Let me explain.

Reasons.

1. The deletion of comments by moderators is one of the few things that we don't get any notification for, as of 2025. Why this is bad: I might have told another user something in the comment section and assume that they got this message, but since a moderator has deleted the comment afterwards and I don't even know about that, it might happen that that other user didn't get that message at all.
2. I know that the moderators on MSE are doing their best to only delete comments that are in fact unappropriate, not relevant anymore, and/or against the site guidelines. But nevertheless it happened to me several times that I didn't understand why they deleted my comment (if I knew at all). That happened even though I know the general reasons why comments may get deleted, but I just didn't understand why they applied, or what was the specific reason. Also, I am not the only one wondering about these decisons: Meta/9874, Meta/6263, Meta/34636, Meta/35606, Meta/30133, Meta/32098, Meta/21081, Meta/22034, Meta/34881. The approach of asking every time on Meta is not scalable in my opinion.
3. In Meta/35606, a moderator simply closed the OP's request to know more about the reason for deletion as a duplicate of other, similar requests, but (a) as mentioned, this approach is not scalable (still many people will not understand these decisions who don't randomly find this on Meta, or even know that the deletion happened in the first place), (b) the specific reasons are still not told to the user, who hence cannot really know how to improve their behavior, (c) the comment section there indicates that for many users there is a lot of confusion and missing knowledge about the purpose of comments.
4. It is kind of frustrating to randomly find out that a comment of mine has been deleted, in particular when no reason is given. Of course, I want to know why it has been deleted and improve my behavior on MSE accordingly. But I can only do that when I know why the deletion happened. It would be much more clear if I got a notification for the reason of deletion. It can be short, something like "use chat instead", "no answers in comment", "no longer relevant", "flagged by another user", ... Thus, the moderators should not have much more work to do, and they already know the reason anyway.
5. Sometimes, moderators delete helpful comments by accident. I believe that if they were encouraged to leave a reason, this would happen less often.

Related. Notice that my question is very similar to the request Meta/26284 from 2017, but that question unfortunately never received an answer. This is an attempt to start this discussion again. For my feature request, I think the notification would already solve most of the issue.

• amWhy: This question is similar to: Why was this comment deleted?. If you believe it’s different, please edit the question, make it clear how it’s different and/or how the answers on that question are not helpful for your problem.
• Martin Brandenburg: Are you kidding? I am referencing this thread (two times actually). It is not the same question. Did you even read my post? Or at least the second paragraph? Same question to the 3 people who have voted to close this. 🤦
• hardmath: I've up voted this Question because it raises a reasonable policy issue and it is well researched. However I don't want the new feature, so perforce I'll have some 'splainin' to post in an Answer.
• Nij: This is just not going to happen. The vast majority of comment deletions are procedural (NLN) or for violations (HBA or UU), and neither of these requires an explanation. You're basically saying you don't trust moderators to do their job accurately or for people flagging comments to do so accurately or in good faith, which is just unacceptable as a feature request. As for "that other thread never got an answer" well, that doesn't matter, a duplicate asking the same thing is what it is.
• Nij: And you're right, it's not scalable to ask about comment deletions on Meta. It just shouldn't be done. Chat exists and can be used for such informal check-ins.
• Martin Brandenburg: "You're basically saying you don't trust moderators to do their job accurately" --- Have you read my post?
• Alex M.: @Nij: That other post asks "why was my comment deleted?". This post asks "should we implement this feature about notifications"? This one is not a duplicate of the other.
• Alex M.: @MartinBrandenburg: This looks like a network-wide functionality, not a MSE-specific one. You should probably ask on Meta Stack Exchange. I doubt that the MSE moderators have the privileges necessary to implement it only here, since it is about changing the software that powers each SE site.

Answer 1

Based on the comment by Alex M. I have forwarded this request to Meta Stackexchange*. There, moderator Spevacus answered the following in a comment.

When you post a comment you must assume that it can or will be deleted at any time. They're ephemeral by design, and are never meant to relay lasting meaningful information. If a moderator deletes them, there is never any behavior to improve. You did nothing wrong by having a comment of yours deleted. If you did (it was unfriendly, or you have a history of posting comments that aren't in line with what comments are for) then mods will reach out privately. I'm against this feature request because it elevates comments to a higher level of importance than they were ever intended to have.

Well, I already knew that comments are ephemeral by design, but the thing about "did not do anything wrong" was new to me, tbh. Unfortunately the feature request also has a negative upvote score, as of writing this.

There are also older equivalent feature requests such as this one (2012) and that one (2013) which were never accepted. There is even one connected to mental health (2017). Staff moderator Oded wrote in the 2nd discussion:

There are no comment removal notifications, nor will there be.
Why? Because comments are second class. We don't see them as important - if you think a comment is important enough, it should be rolled into the post it is commenting on.

The boldface text (highlighted by me) pretty much settles the question. It will not happen.

(I do not agree at all with Oded's answer. When I ask a question to the OP, how on earth shall I integrate that in the OP's post?)

In the 3rd discussion, this answer was very helpful: I didn't know that theoretically I can develop an application that does this notification for me. 🧑‍💻

*I deleted it now since I cannot mentally handle so many downvotes.

• D.W.: Regarding your question about Oded's answer: Oded does accurately describe the Stack Exchange model and how this site works. Posting a comment to request a clarification is absolutely fine and within the purpose of comments. No one expects the request for clarification to be integrated into the question. Rather, the goal is that it should lead to an edit to the question to clarify it (not to discussion in the comments). Clarifications should be provided by edits, not by comments. If you need a clarification to be able to answer, then you should vote to close the question.
• Martin Brandenburg: @D.W. the OP cannot read the comment and improve the post when it has been deleted by a moderator because they thought it's not appropriate for some reason or part of a bigger discussion that the moderator removed as a whole
• Nij: Meh. If the clarification is really so necessary, write the comment again. Or accept it is not so important and move on. Mountains of molehills from misconceptions.
• Martin Brandenburg: How shall I know that I need to write it again when the comment as been deleted without me getting any notification so that I need to check? (The rest of your comment is whataboutism btw.)
• D.W.: @MartinBrandenburg, In my experience a request for a clarification normally is unlikely to be deleted before it has been addressed. Once the request has been addressed (e.g., by editing the post), then the request can be flagged as 'no longer needed' and deleted by moderators. There's no need for anyone to be notified at that point. There's normally no need to ever write it again, because such requests are unlikely to be deleted before they're addressed.

Answer 2

I oppose this specific feature request.

I suspect it might be based on a misunderstanding of the purpose of comments. Comments exist to help lead to improvements to the question/answer (e.g., to request clarification), or to post transient secondary information (e.g., a related question). Comments are, by design, second-class citizens on Stack Exchange and are transient -- they can be deleted at any time. So the system is specifically designed to avoid being "precious" about comments.

Comment deletion does not imply you did anything wrong. It might just mean that the comment served its purpose and isn't needed any longer.

I wonder if there is a way you can get past your frustration about your comments being deleted and take it in stride. Stack Exchange is a place where people can collaborate to build a repository of knowledge that will be useful to others in the future. Part of that is that we routinely edit and delete obsolete information to make this more useful to others. When your comment is deleted, you can know that you tried to help and your comment has served its purpose and its time is now past. Comment deletion is normal and happens all the time.

Enabling such notifications could lead to moderators getting hammered with a flood of unfounded complaints. Unfortunately, it's not feasible for moderators to provide a custom reason for every deletion; that would take a lot of additional time, for something that most users probably would never be aware of.

I don't think the notifications would serve much positive purpose. People don't need to know when their comment has been deleted. There is typically nothing useful we'd want you to do when you receive such a notification. If your comment is deleted, it's very likely to have been deleted for a good reason, and no action is needed from you. Comments are deleted all the time, and you don't need to see the reason why it was deleted. And notifying people could lead them to re-post their old comment which is definitely not the behavior we want.

If you want to know how to improve your behavior, I suggest reading about the purpose behind comments (e.g., https://math.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment). You can always ask here for feedback. But I'm guessing you don't need to go to those lengths. If you care about improving and are listening to feedback people are giving you, I think you're doing great. We're all on a journey of improvement, and if you're doing what you can, then you are a great asset to the site. Does that offer any comfort?

• Martin Brandenburg: Thank you. Just out of curiosity, have you read the 2nd paragraph of my post?
• D.W.: @MartinBrandenburg, Yup! I'm reacting to the reasons for the proposed feature given in the post. If I've made mistaken assumptions, I sincerely apologize, and I'd be glad to change my post.