Changelog: Hidden Comments

About a month ago, we released blocking tools for user safety. That functionality was part of an ongoing priority to provide community members with the tools they need to deal with a variety of situations. Today, we're rolling out the ability for authors to hide specific comments on their posts.

When hiding a comment, the comment as well as any children comments will be removed from view in the article's comments section. A hidden comment (and any of its children replies) has not been deleted it will still be visible in the comment's permalink. Once a comment has been hidden, there will be a visible notice at the bottom of the post.

That notice looks like this:

To hide a comment, authors can click the dropdown of any comment in your post to hide it:

Given the above example, Clouds' reply comment and all replies will be hidden from the comments section.

We want to give authors the agency to manage the discussions happening on their own posts. After all, it is their post, and our community members shouldn't feel concerned that an incendiary comment may tarnish or derail their contributions. We hope this feature will help avoid situations where a comment thread becomes too heated, and will help allow authors to simply hide comments about typos or minor inaccuracies that have been fixed. This tool supplements the regular and consistent efforts of our community moderators, and of course its use is also governed by our Code of Conduct and Terms of Service.

As always, we're open to suggestions on how to improve this feature. If you have a feature request or suggestion that will help us improve community safety, please feel free to open an issue.

Happy coding.