Is it appropriate to delete all comments to a question once they have been acted upon?

Question

In the following question:

In Ticket to Ride USA, does obtaining longest continuous path of routes highly correlate with winning?

I got a few comments on my question, the first of which was 2/3 of a great answer from thesunneversets. The rest of the comments were in response to this 2/3 of an answer, with a request from Pat Ludwig to move it to the answer section. Then sunneversets did expand the answer and move it to the answer section.

It's a great answer but now the comments on the question are distracting and irrelevant IMO, adding nothing to someone reading this Q/A for the first time. Is it appropriate to delete all the comments, leaving nothing but a nice clean Q/A?

Answer 1

Yes, and this is something that moderators can and often do. It's usually considered polite though to leave recent conversations around for a little while before taking actions like this - it allows any further conversation to conclude naturally, and the discussion itself is often helpful for other users, to provide information on community norms. It's also less jarring when you return to a question and you know it looks different, but you can't see why (comment deletions don't appear in the history).

I think that particular discussion has some value as it points out that the comment was acceptable as an (expanded) answer. Personally, I'd give it a week or so before cleaning it up, since your question is still relatively active.

You can always flag a post containing a comment conversation you think is no longer necessary, and we'll take a look.

Relevant meta discussions:

• Should moderators delete obsolete and resolved comment threads?
• Add possibility to remove comment noise (fancy edition)
• Etiquette for explaining removed comments?
• Deleting comments after a fix
• Allow moderators to see deleted comments
• What is an acceptable answer?