Modifying comments

Question

I happened to re-read a comment thread from a couple of days ago and I noticed a comment I had left looked different. There was some additional information and a suggestion that I don't recall making. It was a little disorienting.

I looked it up in the help center and saw that mods have the ability to modify comments. I understand this was done to add helpful information and I'm not upset. But it was honestly a little confusing and made me wonder if I was "losing it" that I didn't recall writing something. :)

Is this an ability that is useful to use as compared to simply adding a new comment? My reason for asking is that while posts clearly show who wrote what, comments don't have an edit history visible to a regular user. So it can be a bit confusing to a regular user to see something attributed to them that they didn't write.

Not a bit deal either way. Thank you mods for all you do! But I just thought I'd share my moment of confusion over this. :)

Answer 1

I expect you're talking about this comment. It was me who edited it: because, if I recall correctly your comment invited the OP (lewis) to post in meta about their question being closed: however with only "1 rep" they're actually not allowed to post in meta (which could be frustrating for them). Given that your comment was trying to help the new OP, rather than post another comment to contradict yours I though it better to lightly edit your comment, to invite them to read meta without inviting them to post.

Sorry for the confusion; I hope I didn't change your intent.

It is true that moderators can edit comments. Occasionally in the past I might have edited someone else's comment to replace a raw http:\\example.com link with the more useful [Article title](http:\\example.com) equivalent.

One more thing is that users can edit their own comments for only the first five minutes after posting it but moderators have no time limit. So I'll sometimes edit my own comments later, for example today I edited this comment to condense and tidy up a previous day's (imo now-obsolete) comment thread.

Thank you for asking; and do tell me if I do something as a moderator which you think I shouldn't.

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On rereading the comment I see that once I started to edit it I also went on and added suggestions of how to fix (or re-ask) the question, based on (i.e. trying to summarize) what other people (i.e. not you) had suggested in the corresponding meta-thread. Sorry about that. I'll try not to do that again.