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It is very common to have sections of comment threads that become moot after a post has been edited. For example,

When you bind click to a selection in jQuery, it does not also bind it to future elements that match that selection. You should use the delegate method to automatically bind to dynamically created elements. The live method used to be used for this purpose, but it was deprecated in jQuery 1.7.

The live method was deprecated in jQuery 1.7, use the delegate method instead. --Commenter
Oh, I didn't know that, thanks! I've edited my answer accordingly. --OP

The answerer edited his answer according to a comment somebody made, which makes the comments moot and thus no longer helpful.

Unfortunately, these comments usually won't be deleted, because if one person deletes his comment, it removes the context for the other comment and makes it confusing.

There should be some way to alleviate this problem. I don't know what sort of thing would work well to ensure that moot comments are deleted, so this question is tagged rather than .

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Delete the comments you posted, flag others' comments as obsolete. –  Dennis Apr 29 '12 at 15:06
I'm not certain the moderators would like to be receiving thousands of comment notices a day. Does it really matter that much? –  ben is uǝq backwards Apr 29 '12 at 17:07
@Ben: They don't mind. That's their job. If the comments are noise or obsolete, flag them and they will be removed. If there aren't enough moderators to handle the load, then we need to elect more moderators, not stop using the tools we're provided to moderate the site. –  Cody Gray Apr 30 '12 at 1:47

2 Answers 2

If you wrote the answer, and you are the user who added the second comment, you can flag the first comment as obsolete; once you see your flag has been handled, you can remove your comment. Leaving your comment before flagging the other one allows the moderators to understand what happened; if they read, "I've edited my answer accordingly," they will understand that what reported in the comment has been included in the answer, and the comment can be deleted.

If you are not the user who wrote the answer, you can flag both the comments as obsolete.

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I don't see this as a problem.

If there were major problems with posts having too many comments then maybe there should be ways to remove "expired" comments -- not that I can think of any good way do to so -- but I haven't seen them: the upvoting system for comments works well to highlight the important ones anyway.

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the upvoting system for comments works well to highlight the important ones anyway. No, not really, more often than not people will up vote the snarky ones, rather than the useful ones. –  Yannis Apr 29 '12 at 15:49

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