I remember someone commenting one of my observations about how to differentiate Prunus species (I recall they said it wasn’t a foolproof set of criteria, but helpful for a ballpark guess if one had more than just one photo of the flowers).
While I found the observation again, unfortunately the person subsequently deleted their comments, likely because they felt uneasy about them.
There is a way to show the precise date of when a comment was made (by clicking on the year, a pop-up will show the precise date and time).
I don’t suppose one can revive a deleted comment, or at least find when it was deleted?
No sorry, but you could perhaps send them a message to inquire about the characteristics.
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That would defeat the purpose of deleting.
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Why, of course! 
Still, I think they were onto something useful, which is why I favorite’d the observation.
I’d love to contact them – if I recalled their nick. 
Which was my secret hope, I guess.
It is possible that the comment is gone not because the user deleted the comment, but because the user deleted their account.
(Maybe relevant: There is a plant IDer in Europe who has gone through at least 3 rounds of creating an account, identifying thousands of observations, getting suspended, deleting their account, and creating a new one. I don’t know the backstory, but it has struck me as rather unfortunate that nobody has found some other way to resolve whatever issues are leading to the suspension, as this person seems quite knowledgeable and the repeated account deletion is fairly disruptive.)
I will note that this seems like another example of why iNat’s current practice of not leaving any record of deleted content is not ideal. It is not just the content of the comment that is lost, but also the history of the discussion on the observation, making it difficult to reconstruct what happened or whether one misremembered that there was a comment on a particular observation. If iNat instead left a message that “user x deleted their comment” or “a comment by a deleted account was here” there would at least be some context letting people know that there are gaps in a discussion.
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Good point. I hadn’t thought of a deleted account, likely because in other nature-related fora that I frequent a deleted account does not automatically also lead to deleting that account’s posts (the posts are simply sanitized of references to that no-longer-existing member, but contents and dates are retained, to maintain the flow and sense of the conversations as they developed).
In other words, when replying to a comment on iNaturalist, we’d better also quote the comment we’re replying to, to make sure the info is not lost. If I had known and done that, the ‘conversation’ would not appear as senseless as it is now:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/71476527
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That would defeat the purpose of why I usually delete comments. I delete comments in which I have tagged someone after they respond. This reduces clutter on the obs.
This is about whole account deletion though, not individual comments.
@sphiphany mentioned both situations and my response was to only one of those situations as per the quoted text.
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I don’t know how often or for what reasons people delete comments; it’s possible that the majority of people who delete comments are doing so for similar reasons as you.
However, there are numerous other situations in which a user might delete a comment – for example, if there was a heated discussion or argument. Deletion in such cases makes the conversation incoherent because there is no indication that anything was deleted. Content that has been hidden or removed by moderators is indicated with a note; I don’t see why content deleted by the user shouldn’t be also.
I don’t understand the argument for “reducing clutter” that is often given as a reason for why “delete without a trace” is fine or desirable. Comments tagging users and deleted IDs are also part of the observation history. Why do they need to be erased?
There are too many situations where “delete without a trace” creates very real problems that it seems to me that the minor annoyance of a bit of extraneous content in an observation is a reasonable trade-off for keeping a record that content was deleted.
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I agree with spiphany. iNaturalist is the only place that I am familiar with that has this “total erasure” policy.
PS: The ‘reduce clutter’ theory is unconvincing. People are allowed to comment about everything, why would a tag inviting another user to have a look be so terrible? Has it occurred to the erasers that newer member might learn who is who and who is a good person to tag for this kind of organism? Removing comments with summoning tags is curtailing the usefulness of iNaturalist and runs counter to its mission.
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