Is it allowed to mention the source/reference of possible answer in comments instead of writing answer?

Question

2-3 days back, someone asked this question What are points for and against the three Farm Bills passed by Indian parliament recently?

Well, originally it had a different title, and it was closed because it asked for opinions. I tried my best to edit the question and finally it was opened.

Because the OP was still looking for "pros" and "cons", which can only be speculated, I made a comment which is something like (I don't remember the exact way how I wrote it)

@akshit the pros and cons can only be speculated. If you are looking for the arguments for the bills, you might look into PRS website, RSTV and DD news. The arguments against are available in the editorials section of any newspaper. Hope that helps!

My comment was deleted.

Reason:

Apparently, your comment was deleted after a single flag. That can happen when a comment contains certain "trigger" keywords, which are kept secret and may differ per SE site. See: How does comment voting and flagging work?

_{Comment by Mod Yannis}

OP's name is Akshit Mahajan. It's an Indian name and it has the "s" word. Maybe it was a regex match to *sh _ _ which could be a trigger word. Doesn't matter.

I would appreciate if someone tells me

• if sources of possible answer are allowed to be mentioned in comments? Because, no one had answered, and I was feeling lazy to do something (which I consider) easy. Plus, it brings clarification as to why OP was struggling.

Answer 1

I don't think this is possible to answer in a general way.

Strictly speaking, your comment can be seen as an attempt at answering the question and thus it was correctly flagged. Comments are there to request clarification or leave constructive criticism, and nothing else. We very strongly prefer answers, even partial/incomplete ones, to be posted as actual answers.

At the same time, I don't see anything particularly wrong in a comment that points people in the right direction - especially in an unanswered question. You were unlucky that your comment included certain "trigger" keywords that resulted in it getting immediately deleted after a single flag. If the flag had appeared in the flag queue, I'd probably ignore it for a day or two to give people some time to use the information in it.

I think the best option here is to try and expand your comment to an answer. It may not be the greatest answer on the site ever, but it still will be more valuable than a low visibility comment that may disappear at any time.