I think this is a very important thing to discuss as comments can be as, if not more, dangerous than answers, especially if the claims they make are not backed up.
What I believe should be our policy on answers in the comments is we should always delete them. CommentsComments are for:
Request[ing] clarification from the author;
Leav[ing] constructive criticism [to guide] the author in improving the post;
Add[ing] relevant but minor or transient information to a post (e.g. a link to a related question, or an alert to the author that the question has been updated).
They are not for several things, one of which includes is:
- Answering a question or providing an alternate solution to an existing answer; instead, post an actual answer (or edit to expand an existing one);
This means that we should delete all comments in answers. It is actually an SE policy (though many sites don't follow it). As mentioned below in the comments by @anongoodnurse, answers in the comments are just "answers which cannot be down voted." We do not want this. Voting is how we determine what content is good or bad. That is why all answers in the comments should be deleted with a label left saying something like
<comments deleted> Please do not leave answers in the comments. Instead, it would be appreciated if you leave an actual answer (with references) below.
###How can we do this?
If we decide to do this, it will put an extra burden on the moderators. It doesn't have to be only our job, though. As I talked about in https://health.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/352/we-need-more-community-moderation, we need you, the community to help make this happen. Flag comments that are answers, we will try to review them as soon as we can. If the claim is dangerous, be the one to step up and tell the commenter that. This will be something hard to enforce, but it is possible if we can get the community to help.
