Learn English – “There do not appear to be any comments to delete.”

differencesword-choice

In a CMS I am using, when a user with the right permission tries to delete a comment that is not found, the CMS outputs the following warning message:

There do not appear to be any comments to delete, or your selected comment was deleted by another administrator.

Is the sentence correct?
Is it the accepted way to write such sentences?
What is the difference with it seems there are no comments to delete, or there are no comments to delete?

Best Answer

I see nothing wrong with that sentence. It explains what the issue is and informs the user that the comment cannot be deleted because it doesn't exist.

You could write that sentence any number of different ways, but I don't really see any advantages/disadvantages between any of the possible options really.

If it was a CMS I wrote, it would probably say something like this:

The comment you attempted to delete no longer exists. It may have been deleted by another administrator.

To answer the second half of your question, the only difference between the two snippets you provides is certainty. The first version does not state definitively that there are no comments, only that it appears that way. The second one states simply that there are none.