Possibly related to can we prohibit erasure of comments?...
On the thread Asserting that Atheism and Theism are both faith based positions, I posted an answer. There was a short exchange of questions in comments, as normal, which was approaching the point I thought we should move it to chat.
Then a moderator decided unilaterally to delete all my reply comments (and only mine), which left the comment thread unintelligible. A few hours later, all other replies were deleted. A few more comments were then made, but today I've found they've all been deleted.
Moving a comment thread to chat is absolutely normal when it becomes a discussion. Permanently deleting abusive comments is absolutely normal too. Permanently deleting comments after a few short, polite questions and answers though is unacceptable behaviour from a moderator, especially when they only delete one side of that thread so they destroy the value of that interaction for readers.
Ideally I would like the person responsible to justify why they did it, but I know that's unlikely. More practically, I'd like to ask how the site prevents rogue moderators from arbitrarily deleting comments, or puts some kind of penalty on them doing this? Downvoting or deleting questions and answers is handled well, but there seems not to be a good mechanism for dealing with inappropriate moderator behaviour.
This allows a rogue moderator to shut down any line of questioning on an answer which they disagree with, or simply to randomly delete comments for no reason other than to cause a nuisance. Whilst comments are not intended for extended debate, of course, they are intended for questioning which may improve or extend the answer; and moving those comments to chat is intended as a way of allowing this to take place without "polluting" the main thread. The value of SE is knowledge transfer through human interaction. If rogue moderators shut down that human interaction, then we lose what makes SE valuable.
Is there any way to solve this problem?