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I've seen on some occasions, either here or on other stack exchange sites, if I attempt to add a comment to a question / answer that's received many comments, an option that appears recommending to move the discussion into chat.

On a recent question that I'd asked, I noticed a fairly large amount of comments appearing, and wanted to request that those be moved to chat, but noticed there was no option to do so when I was looking at the question.

I searched through the help center, and tried searching for any meta questions I could find referencing this, but haven't been able to identify a clear definition of how this is supposed to work.

I ended up flagging the post for moderator attention, asking that the comments be moved, but I feel that it may not have been appropriate for me to bring something like this up to a moderator's attention.

So, I wanted to ask on the meta site to get some clarification on this.

Is this something that moderators do?

Is it something that the community can do once a user has reached a certain amount of rep?

When should this be done?

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    I think it shows up if you start having a back-and-forth conversation with someone, but I'm not positive.
    – David K
    Jun 19, 2017 at 15:09

2 Answers 2

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Is this something that moderators do?

We often move discussions to chat here. Any post which receives 20+ comments generates an automatic flag, which we normally will act on as it suggests exactly what you are mentioning here - discussion.

Is it something that the community can do once a user has reached a certain amount of rep?

If you go back/forth with someone, eventually a "let's move this to chat" option appears. This requires a back/forth though and I'm not clear exactly when this happens.

When should this be done?

Flagging is fine. Honestly, it's actually nice to see someone who feels similarly about comments as "they are intended" by SE design. Normally we get lots of hate for deleting/moving comments to chat...

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    3 comments from each of 2 people, according to something Shog said that I can't find right now.
    – Monica Cellio
    Jun 19, 2017 at 19:15
  • Is / Was there a specific reason that individual users participating in a discussion can move their own conversation to chat, but other users can't vote to do this or do it on their own based on rep? Has there been a discussion of this previously or is this just how it was implemented initially? It seems like an issue that occurs commonly enough that having high-rep users able to do this might reduce some of the load on mods.
    – schizoid04
    Jun 26, 2017 at 22:02
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Yes, moderators can and do move them at a whim, I've seen answers with much less than 20 comments have them moved to chat.

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  • If I remember it right, I once got my single comment moved to chat (which admittedly was an attempt to derail the question to a discussion about something else entirely).
    – Dmitry Grigoryev
    Jun 27, 2017 at 16:25

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