I looked all over SE Meta and couldn't find a definitive answer there or via Google, so hopefully one the more seasoned SE users knows this. Is there a way to move a comment thread to chat once things start to get chatty/off topic? Is it buried in the site interface somewhere? Is it a mod-only action?
I know a suggestion kicks in once the size of the thread to get too large, but I'd like preemptively do this before the suggestion happens.
If you don't see the suggestion (which anyway would not move the comments to a chat room, but rather create a chat room containing a copy of the comments, when there are two users replying to each other), you don't have a way to move the comments in a chat room, if not by flagging the post for moderation attention.
Keep in mind that a post with more than 20 comments will be automatically flagged for moderation attention. So, you normally don't need to do anything about those posts with too much comments.
