Greetings!, and welcome to DailyKos. If you're reading this diary sometime after its publishing, you've presumably shat a brick over the fact that your comment seemingly disappeared into thin air. Fear not, young padawan. Your comment has been hidden.
Moderation on this site is largely the responsibility of prolific members of our community. Once you've been around long enough as an active commenter in good standing, you have a good chance at meeting the system's criteria of a trusted user.
A trusted user is able to both recommend and hide rate a comment.
Recommending
Recommending (also called "tipping," "uprating," or "+4") a comment means different things to different people, ranging the spectrum from "I agree with this comment" to "I publicly acknowledge that I read this comment." The more recommends you have, the more likely you are to attain trusted user status.
Hide rating
Hide rating (also called "donutting," "HRing," "troll rating," "TRing," and "hydrating") a comment means that the comment is so nasty that it deserves to be hidden from public view. See the site's FAQ page for details on appropriate uses of the hide rate.
Only trusted users can see hidden comments. That's a feature, not a bug. If you are not a trusted user and your comment suddenly disappears, that means that at least two or three trusted users decided that it was bad enough to be hidden. Your comment wasn't deleted. I've been here almost 3 years and I can't remember but two instances of a comment actually being deleted. This only happens in extreme cases of very personal information (name, address, telephone number, etc.) being posted in a comment. That is a certain bannable offense, and the tech team has to physically go through the site's code line by line to delete the comment by hand. That's a lot of work -- it just doesn't happen unless something dire comes up.
Let's take a look at an example of a hidden comment with uprates on it:
George W. Bush's comment was hidden by 15 trusted members and uprated by 4, meaning that they don't believe that the comment should be hidden. The people who uprated George W. Bush's comment will likely have their trusted user status (or ratings ability) removed. Usually comments are hidden for a reason. If you feel deep down that a hidden comment didn't deserve to be hidden (there's nothing objectionable about it), then uprate it. Just be sure that you're right.
Having a hidden comment isn't the end of the world. Getting HR'ed isn't the end of the world. Don't have a flameout because your comment was hidden.
Hope this helps.
9:09 PM PT: Good point made in the comments below. I forgot about this.
Might want to add that TU has option to see hidden (1+ / 0-)
Although this diary is for new users, since you mentioned that trusted users can see hidden comments, you might want to add that there is a option in your profile to allow trusted users to see the hidden comments. I believe that the default is that the hidden comments are not displayed.
Go to your profile page, click on "EDIT PROFILE", after "Comment Preferences", select your preference for "Display hidden comments?".
by rja on Wed Jun 13, 2012 at 12:04:11 AM EDT