[Bioc-devel] Moderating "answers" into comments on other answers/comments on the support site?

[Ryan C. Thompson]

Hello,

On support.bioconductor.org, we've seen a lot of instances of people 
using the answer box when they should be adding a comment on an existing 
answer. I don't necessarily blame uses, since the "Add your answer" text 
box is far more obvious than the "add comment" button on an existing 
answer. However, as far as I can tell, it's impossible to use the 
moderator tools to convert an answer into a comment on another answer or 
comment, so when I see this happen, I just have to leave it as is, since 
converting the answer to a comment on the question would just make 
things even more confusing and out-of-order. So, given that this is 
probably the most common moderation action  that I would want to do, 
could this feature be added to the moderator tools?

Also, I will note that this problem happens almost exclusively on 
whichever answer is listed last, i.e. the answer with the "add your 
answer" text box immediately below it in the position that one would 
look for a "reply" text box. For answers that are higher up, useres 
almost always find the "Add comment" button since they are not 
distracted by an existing text box. So I think we could greatly reduce 
instances of this issue by putting a much clearer visual separation 
between the last answer and the "add your answer box", and maybe doing 
like StackOverflow does and popping up an "are you sure you want to 
answer your own question" dialog when a user tries to write in the 
answer box for their own question.

Thanks,

-Ryan

P.S. I hope bioc-devel is the right place to ask about how to do 
moderation on the support site.