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I believe that a comment that I made on the following MSE post was deleted without any notice to me or any record that I can see of the deletion.

Distinction between "if any" and "if every".

Could that have happened?

[EDIT] Follow-up: thanks for the answer and comments. Further comments of mine have been deleted from the above post. Could one of the moderators please explain to me what has happened and why.

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  • $\begingroup$ Why the down vote? $\endgroup$ – Rob Arthan Nov 23 '15 at 2:18
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    $\begingroup$ I was the moderator deleting the comments. They were all flagged as non-sense. Native users of English language felt that way. And I have encountered similar differences between math language and natural language elsewhere on the globe as well. IMO you already made your point and then started beating a dead horse by insisting that idioms of natural language should prevail, when in math the meaning is dictated by context. May be I erred? If so I apologize. The moderators are discussing the case, because we are not in agreement either. $\endgroup$ – Jyrki Lahtonen Nov 23 '15 at 21:46
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    $\begingroup$ Anyway, it's too late an hour for me to try and figure out who is arguing in favor of exactly what. I undelete all the comments for now. But I would actually recommend that the discussion take place here. That comment exchange has IMO wandered outside math. $\endgroup$ – Jyrki Lahtonen Nov 23 '15 at 21:48
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    $\begingroup$ Thank you for the explanation and for restoring the comments. Two of my comments were in reply to a comment including the following: "Please stop arguing - the sooner you can accept that you fundamentally misunderstand this, the sooner you can learn, move on, and stop misinforming people." I hope you understand why I wanted a right to reply to such a statement. $\endgroup$ – Rob Arthan Nov 23 '15 at 22:21
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    $\begingroup$ Understood. I failed to diagnose that I am not qualified to make a ruling here. Also I failed to read the arguments carefully enough to realize that you actually argued in favor of context giving the decisive clues to the interpretation of the meaning of a sentence. I support that. $\endgroup$ – Jyrki Lahtonen Nov 24 '15 at 6:32
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When comments get deleted, there is never any notice or any indication of deleted comment. Nobody but moderators can see deleted comments.

If you successfully posted a comment, and did not delete it yourself, that means it was deleted either by a moderator, or by an automatic process. Flagging leads to deletion if one of the following happens:

  1. Moderator handles the flag and decides to delete the comment
  2. The comment gets $3+(x/3)$ flags, where $x$ is the score of the comment. Then it's deleted automatically.
  3. The comment matches a pattern that makes it eligible for autodeletion with a single flag. See What is the SE version of Seven Dirty Words? for the list of known patterns (NSFW).

It's also possible that moderator's attention was drawn to the post by something else (e.g., a flag on another comment), and your comment was deleted in the process of clean-up.

General reference: How do comments work?

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    $\begingroup$ Thanks for the clarification. So MSE does not retain an accurate record of my actions that I can access. $\endgroup$ – Rob Arthan Nov 23 '15 at 2:18
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    $\begingroup$ Comments occasionally get deleted without having been flagged, when a moderator decides to "clean up" a comment thread. $\endgroup$ – Gerry Myerson Nov 23 '15 at 5:19
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    $\begingroup$ This (3. above) gives me an idea for leaving ephemeral comments... $\endgroup$ – copper.hat Nov 25 '15 at 1:27
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    $\begingroup$ @copper.hat: After reading that linked post, I like "what have you tried" very much. Actually I like "Did you try anything at all?" better. $\endgroup$ – user21820 Nov 27 '15 at 11:21

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