Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-31892545-20180827220000/@comment-9605025-20180827232400

Well, the important part is that content is not deleted. If you turn comments off, talk page content will return. If you turn comments on, previous comments will return. The whole thing about being visible only applies if you, for some reason, want to view the contents of one while the other is active. If you still want to know, I will attempt to clarify that portion of my previous comment in the following paragraphs.

Both talk pages and article comments provide a single place from which to view the content when the respective features are enabled. The difference is how that content is stored. This doesn't usually matter to users but it does impact how you can view the content when the respective feature is disabled.



Talk pages are literally a single page where everyone just adds their comment to the end of the page. The name of this page uses the same title as the article but it is in the corresponding talk namespace. The most common example is an article in the main namespace such as "Example_Article". The talk page for that would be "Talk:Example_Article". While talk pages are disabled, you just need to go to "Talk:Example_Article" and everything will be there.

Article comments, on the other hand, store the actual comments inside a subpage structure and then retrieve those comments for display at the bottom of the article. Blog comments, message walls, and forum work in a similar manner. In the case of article comments, initial comments are stored as subpages of the talk page. Replies to a comment are stored as a subpage of the subpage that stores the initial comment. Here is an example.

Let's say you post an article comment on "Example_Article" at exactly 13:25:43 (a.k.a. 1:25:43 PM) on January 17 2019. Your comment will be stored on the subpage "Talk:Example_Article/@comment-31892545-20190117132543". Now, let us assume I reply to your comment at exactly 11:54:17 on January 23 2019. My reply would be stored on the subpage "Talk:Example_Article/@comment-31892545-20190117132543/@comment-9605025-20190123115417". Now, let's assume I make my own comment (not a reply) 23 minutes and 13 seconds later. That comment would be stored on "Talk:Example_Article/@comment-9605025-20190123121730". If you wanted to view the article comments while the feature was disabled, you would have to visit each individual page. There would be no single page from which to view the overall discussion. 

As previously mentioned, forum works in a similar manner. Using this thread as our example:
 * Your initial post
 * My first reply
 * A list of all replies to your initial post