SharePoint Issues list disappearing comment

I had a stressful 15 minutes yesterday. I had set up a new list in SharePoint to help our back-office manage sets of transactions they'll be manually processing over the next couple of weeks. I started from the pre-made Issues list since it had most of the data columns I needed already. I added a few text fields and a few drop boxes pre-populated with values. I tested it out with some data they would actually be using and gave a quick training session on the tool. I repeatedly recommended that they work from the Datasheet view, since that look the most like the Excel spreadsheet they're used to working in.

The next day, the team started using the list. About 30 minutes into it, a user sent me an email saying that the text she was entering into the Comment field seemed to be disappearing. Uh oh. I quickly jumped into the list, assigned a few rows to myself, and started playing around with values to see if I could get the comment to disappear. I entered data into the row (in Datasheet view), and arrowed down to the next row to save. No disappearing text. I went back to one of the status fields on that row and changed a value from Y to N, then arrowed down to the next row. Poof - the text in the Comment field disappeared. WTF?

The answer, of course, is that the Comment column in the Issues list has preset behavior. They way you're supposed to use it is to enter a comment for that record describing the update you just made to the record. So when you make a change, SharePoint helpfully clears that field out for you so you can leave your current comment. The old comment is not lost though. SharePoint also archives the comment with the record - which you can see if you look at the record in detail view. Since I had everyone working in Datasheet view, I didn't see that the comments were being archived with a date/time stamp.

Since the comment was archived, I told everyone to stop working for a minute while I created a new column to hold their data. I copied the existing comments into the new column, and for the one's that had been auto-archived, went into the detail view and then cut-pasted those also into the new column. Then I hid the old Comment field from view so no one would accidentally use it again. Problem solved. Hopefully if anyone's googling this issue, this will help them.