Sometimes you find a Q&A where a commenter left a highly upvoted but very short comment, which on its own would not pass the standards for answers, and nobody bothered to convert it into an answer. Or maybe the comment is very useful in context, but does not directly answer the question per se, and has a risk of being deleted, but in comment form people usually let is slide.
Maybe people consider such usage of comments appropriate or think it would not be fair to claim reputation for that comment, and also choose to not “steal” it from the commenter by posting a community wiki attributing it to them.
What do you think should be done in such cases? Do you think people should be allowed to post such not quite an answer but still useful information in comments?
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Should there be a functionality to promote an upvoted comment to an answer, so that it can be expanded upon (while preventing it from being deleted as a result of this promotion, as it was deemed useful previously)? Like having 5 users covert-to-answer-vote a comment, similar to close-voting.
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I feel a convert-to-answer vote would be criminally ignored/stuck at 2/3 votes if it required 5 people to vote on it, unless there was a review queue similar to other VTCs.
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I believe a certain platform (MSDN?) has/had a way to select something as an answer and something else as “helpful” or “supporting” information.
I think we could do something similar with comments - let people not only upvote a comment but tag it as “supporting/helpful addition to the answer”. Perhaps once it reaches a certain number of people tagging it as such, then it gets highlighted and placed immediately beneath the question (between the answer and the comments section), or in some other visibly prominent place.
Keeps answers as answers and comments as comments, but lets people see what helpful additions.
IMO this is one of the best features of comments, and having a way to highlight them (even if they’re not valuable enough to be answers themselves) would be nice.
Furthermore, I really, really dislike it when the accepted answer is “do it this way”, and then another answer is buried way down saying “but now five years later we can do it THIS way!” – if there was a comment saying “see @XYZ’s answer for the current version” that was highlighted, it would save me a tremendous amount of headache.
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