How are we to discuss improvements when comments on contentious posts are being "nuked without warning"?

Question

A recent question on whether videogames cause US school shootings seems to have caused quite a row, as the sole comments on the question and most highly voted answer are moderator notes with this message:

Deleted the whole comment thread since some users decided to start to insult each other. Further comments will be nuked without warning, we don't need this kind of behavior here.

Accordingly, all comments are being continuously deleted, even if they are constructive.

I understand that such a lockdown eases moderator workload during flame wars, but it also makes the site unusable for everyone. I'm left confused about what I should do. Post a comment anyway? Check back later? Give up forever?

I wish the suggested alternative were communicated better to potential commenters.

Answer 1

The idea is to stop nuking comments as soon as the question gets out of the HNQL (that is, hopefully soon).

I've tried to leave one constructive comment now, let's see if that works! My expectation though is that as people post less constructive stuff, and it gets nuked, we will be accused of bias, but I'd love to be proven wrong :-)

To give you an idea of what we are deleting exactly, in the last 24 hours we've deleted from the question:

• 7 comments that were pseudoanswers or replies to pseudoanswer comments
• 1 comment complaining about deleting comments
• 0 comments that were conforming to commenting guidelines

We've deleted from the answer:

• 14 comments that were basically "why doesn't your answer include <my pet explanation/graph/idea/suggestion on how to be a statistician>?" and their replies (so: pseudoanswers)
• 1 comment asking for more sources (this could have been left)
• 1 thank you comment