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I'm "cleaning" some unanswered questions that has no answer, but I found that an surprising amount of them solved their problems in comments. Is correct to flag comments and upgrade them to answers or should a proper answer be made.

An example of this is "Configuring Xorg.conf for i915 intel driver" that one comment resolved the particular OP case, although other methods are available.

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I don't think you should flag those - moderators don't have a "convert comment to answer" feature, so they can't act on your flag directly.

What you can do though is:

  • Ask the person who answered in comments to make a proper answer – this is more likely to work for recent comments from active users obviously.
  • Post the answer yourself if the above hasn't worked (or doesn't look like it could work). If you feel guilty about "stealing" the answer (and potential reputation points attached), mark your answer as a community wiki. (And mention that the solution was provided by @whoever too.)

Of course moderators could do that too, but that's not really their job.

In case you feel like summarizing a long comment thread into a proper answer, one thing you could flag is the comment thread itself since it has become obsolete (flag the first comment and explain what you did and that the whole thread could be cleaned up). That's double good: proper summarized answer and less comment noise.

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    TOO LATE. If you wanted to answer this maybe you should've been 7 seconds faster
    – Michael Mrozek
    Jul 8, 2013 at 17:02
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    I waited a bit to see if someone would post an answer in the question's comments? You could convert this, for the irony :-)
    – Mat
    Jul 8, 2013 at 17:11
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Not really, since we can't do anything about it. The best thing to do is probably to reply to the comment asking the user to post an answer, or (if they haven't been around for a while) just repost the comment as an answer yourself. Posting answers as comments is particularly common here versus other Stack Exchange sites; I'm not quite sure why

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