Post History

Comments are intended to be ephemeral. They're used to hammer out issues with a post, to discuss how it could be improved, etc. When they've served that purpose, they can and should be removed.

Comments are _not_ there for:

 * answers
 * arguments
 * off-topic chatter
 * discussion of policy (that's what Meta categories are for)
 * any useful information that should stick around

Comments that are any of those or that are otherwise no longer useful should be expected to be deleted. I've had a read through the linked threads, and I can't find anything there that shouldn't have been deleted - I can only see disagreements over policy (which should come here to Meta), and pointers on ways to improve the question which have been resolved one way or another.

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As for moderator elections, that's something we'd like to do but we don't yet have the community size to support it. A representative election needs a decent number of voters; the people who would become voters in a moderator election are the frequent, engaged users, and that's what we're trying to build on. For the moment, we've appointed moderators to steward these communities through that process; once an election is likely to succeed we'll look at the ways of doing that.