With the current settings, a comment has a day to make it out of pending. If you delete a pending comment, it's no longer pending.

If the comment doesn't make it out of pending in a day, what happens to it and its poster then?

Edit: Deletion is currently possible for less than that (2 hours?). Will this be different for pending comments?

Yes, deletion is possible for a pending comment as long as it's pending.

I see. You said above that a comment only has a day to make it out of pending. Why not auto-delete it when it doesn't? Edit: Never mind that question. Based on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446005 this seems to be the case (i.e., you won't have to delete a failed pending comment manually).

On a related note, the new system may prevent people from posting in the feature suggestion thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363). Since it's already a special thread that never closes for comments perhaps comments posted there should not be made pending.

The other type it could cause problems for are whoishiring.

Oops, yes, another thing I overlooked.

How long is the immutable timeout? I've never timed it, but I have a hunch that comments lose their delete-ability in less than 24 hours. So please be sure that pending comments can be deleted for the entire duration of their 24hr pend state.

Don't worry, they can.

Is there a 'pending mention' for the author of the comment ?

I like the idea of pending comments, but I don't like encouraging the deletion of the unsuccessful pending comments. Especially in the low flow threads.

I suppose that the 24 hours is a parameter that is easy to change and tweak. I think it's a lot of time. What about 1 or 2 hours?

Another possible idea is to have up to two pending comments, so someone can contribute in two threads, go to work/eat/sleep, and read the replies. But this version is more difficult to implement and more difficult to explain.

You need to add a cool off timer of say 5 minutes still even if you delete a pending post, otherwise can bet somebody will abuse this to churn up there system DOS style. There be dragons out there.

Also some visiable indication on near the user/logoff part of the page indicating if can post or awaiting approval of a pend - say a "+" indicating can add a post and a "-" indicating you can't as have pending post.

That might increase by a lot the number of new account created by people who don't want to wait to comment.

We already have pretty good protections against that from years of spammers and voting rings trying it.

I'm guessing there's an implied "in that thread" to that particular rule. I'd still rather see a timeout than give people only one shot at a thread.

This sounds like a feature, not a bug. :-)

Except if you post a comment in a dead thread, your account is practically banned from participating again.

It breaks down for threads that only ever get a single viewer (who comments).

At least, I don't get the impression that this update is intended to prevent such posts regardless of content (eg a reference to a related paper on some obscure topic).