Post History

## Rethinking flagging

> needs author's attention  
> This question is off-topic or cannot be reasonably answered in its current form and needs revision by its author.
> 
> This flag will be added as a comment to this post's feedback thread.

Using this flag creates, or adds to, a thread named Post Feedback.  The idea was to collect all the direct "please clarify X" etc feedback in one place, separate from the discussions and tangents that tend to break out in comments.

Someone in chat asked if that trick really works -- will people do that?  It's a fair question.

I think this idea originally came from a mockup for *close* votes, where if you choose this close reason you're prompted for an optional comment that turns into special feedback for the author.  The idea is that the author would see some sort of annotation right there on the question about potential closure, with the comment(s) or a link.  And similarly for duplicates.  I think for those cases, where some action against the question is pending, this makes sense.

For comments that aren't attached to close/dupe votes, though, I'm not sure it makes sense to go through flagging.  What would happen if we removed this flag reason entirely, so people who want to leave feedback need to leave comments directly?