When a user wants to delete their question, don't let them click delete, then make them read this long message asking them to think it over when they actually can't delete it, since it has answers by others.  IOW, I think it's a bug that the system goes so far as to put up a sort of a warning (red button means warning in my book!) urging that users think it over when they don't actually have a choice, as they actually can't delete it, since it has answers by others. Note: I'm not urging that a particular question be deleted and not seeking moderator action; note that I'm tagging this bug, not support.
85597
So I tried deleting a question, my question. I'm not a mod, but I have reputation above 10k. I received this message after hitting delete, asking me to make sure I wanted to:    But after clicking Delete Question, I saw this:    It turns out that because the question has answers, I'm prohibited from deleting it. If I can't actually delete this question at all, could it just tell me immediately, and only show me the warning if I can actually delete it?  This is akin to the following analogy.     You see a flyer in your local paper stating there's a new burger shop   opening.  Great, you think to yourself, and rush over to get yourself   some burgers.  On your way into the parking lot, you see a huge banner   proclaiming one of their newest burgers. You see some employees walk   in and out of the restaurant, with T-Shirt with pictures of burgers on   them.  Great, you think to yourself, and walk in.   You get in line,   and after what seems like ages, you finally make it to the front.  You   look up at the menu.  You see that they also sell sandwiches. No, you   tell yourself, I'm looking for burgers.  You see that they also sell   burritos! No, you tell yourself, I'm looking for burgers.  Then you   see that they sell burgers. Great! You pick out a burger, then tell   the employee at the register, "Sir, I'd like to get a regular burger   please." Immediately, the employee looks up, with a quizzical look on   his face, saying "Sir? We don't sell burgers here.".   It's the same situation. I've come to that prompt so that I can delete a question.  After repeated messages and windows letting me know the consequences of deleting, what will happen after I have it deleted, I am told that the option of having it deleted by my own hand never existed in the first place.
83044
This is related to  question. I think we should discourage "Belongs on S[OFU]" type comments. I think they encourage the OP to go to the indicated site and re-ask the question. Flagging/voting to move on the question should be sufficient. Assuming this is the case, would it be proper to flag those comments for mod removal to hopefully get them removed before a new user sees them and duplicates the question?  Or, another example:    Or, even worse, but this new (!) user probably just doesn't know better:
72874
Recently I just deleted one of my answer in stackoverflow where there was one comment. After deleting the answer it also show for sometime that we all know but in the comment it still allow us to up to make it useful but as I clicked it it just showed me the message:  If we are not allowed to do then what was the meaning? Why don't it just be removed or make it disable if the answer is deleted. Just don't show UI for actions that can't be actioned
105846
We get some questions from time to time where the OP has posted his access codes or API keys to various online systems, like Twitter, Facebook, etc.  These questions tend to linger in the flag queue for a long time since moderators do not have the ability to completely remove a revision or even the whole question, we can only do a soft-delete.  As such, a flag is usually left by a moderator for a dev/team to look at, and I suspect the devs/the team has enough to do because those flags tend to be sitting in the queue for at least a day, often drawing multiple flags from the OP to have his question deleted. In other words, since the question cannot be fixed without a complete delete, without a dev, the OP gives up waiting for his question to be fixed and instead requests it to be completely deleted. It would be nice if we could avoid that.  Would it be possible to get a function where moderators could completely remove a revision and/or the whole question, as long as multiple moderators agree? What I mean is that I could flag the question/revision for a hard-deletion, and 1-2 other moderators would have to agree by flagging in the same way. Once it has accrued enough such flags, it is gone. Optimally the flag would require the first moderator to write a short explanation of why this is necessary as well.  This would mean the moderators could fix such things themselves, without involving or waiting for a dev/the team to handle it, and still not be able to remove anything completely by themselves, a consensus is needed.
72569
I'm a moderator on . I recently was surprised to find a question I had ‘helped with’ vanish without a trace from the site (including any references to my actions on it). Now, of course, questions can be deleted, but deletions are of interest to moderators, right?  As part of my search, I found the /admin/recently-self-deleted page and went there. The question was not listed even though, afterward, I determined that it had been self-deleted (at the time) two hours ago. It is now days since the deletion and the question is still not showing up, even though other questions have. This seems like a bug.  For any moderators/SE staff wishing to investigate:  and .  The question has no votes, no answers, and was deleted one day after it was posted.
89664
Scenario:   Assume you are a user suffering some type of being banned, where if you try to suggest an edit. You will not be able to do so, and instead you get a message like "You are temporarily banned from suggesting edits - please review your edit history." Navigate to anything similar to this:   Using the link "" you will arrive at a page containing (only) this message:     This post has been deleted - no more edits are allowed  Change 'reputation' to any other valid tag, eg 'new-user', and the same scenario can be repeated for that tag also (though its 'improve wiki tag' also varies of course).   Related feature requests:   appears to me as a way to prevent this scenario from happening.  Possible duplicate questions:  To avoid creating a duplicate question, I searched for . The search results do not contain any question titles that seem related to my question here.  I also think this issue is not a duplicate of "".  My Questions:   It appears to me that this message is at least misleading, if not wrong. No? Shouldn't it display a normal error message indicating that the user is not allowed to edit due to an account restriction? Why would it think that the post is deleted?
44603
I think you should be notified if anything of yours is deleted or even flagged, preferably with some explanation (even if it's a simple categorisation like #rude, #irrelevant, #incorrect) and who did it.  Recently, a couple of comments of mine vanished without warning or evidence afterwards. I'm fine with deletion, but I think it should be used sparingly and be based on democratic decisions. What's the harm of letting a comment simply sit with no up-votes or responses rather than outright removal? Or allow downvoting and then negatively voted comments are hidden by default?  I get the impression that anything I post could be deleted. Very few people want to be unpopular or do the wrong thing. It takes time to understand what something is about and how best to use it (this site). Whether or not what I posted deserved to be deleted is irrelevant because I got no feedback. No-one can learn without feedback. The number of frivolous comments with many upvotes I've seen shows how inconsistently the rules are applied. A community that gives too much power to highly rated users won't grow but turn stagnant.  Sorry if this was rude, inappropriate or pathetic. I'm aware that similar discussions have occurred. In any case, I'll continue to use the site and move on...
6514
is a good system. But when a gold badge holder closes a question, a comment still gets created on the voter's behalf, even though it will be immediately deleted by the system due to the question being closed as a duplicate. This is contrary to what normally happens when a moderator closes a question - no comment is ever created or deleted.  This is problematic because the comment's creation (even though it gets deleted in the same instant) still causes notifications to be sent out:   The owner of the question receives an inbox notification telling them that there is a new comment on their post, which doesn't actually exist anymore. Anyone viewing the question at the time  that there is a new comment on the question, only to have nothing new at all load when they click to load the new comments.   I propose that all binding close votes refrain from leaving a comment, not only those cast by diamond moderators.
74656
The  was deleted last night by the Community user.    Normally, I wouldn't see an issue with this, but for this particular deletion, I can see three issues:   We try not to delete good content There are multiple upvoted answers We often use previous answers on Meta (as well as badly asked questions) to form the precedent (and to use as duplicates) when users ask questions like this in the future   On a personal note, I find it easier to link to one of my previous answers whenever possible.  This seems like a bug with the deletion algorithm, , the deletion algorithm should never delete questions with upvoted answers.  I'm going to go ahead and undelete it, but I'm bringing this up in case there was either:    A policy change A bug   So is it either of the above or something else?
58767
I notice a really worrying trend of some really popular questions being closed and eventually deleted. Some of them became legends already, like this one  ? Yes, it does not fit the format ideally, but what is point of obeying the letter of the law to such extent that it becomes ridiculous? Ok, closing is fine if community leaders became so pedantic, but why go so far as to even delete it? At this point it looks like burning old pictures just because you don't like them.  Update: Summary  For now I heard only two clear arguments:   Those questions pollute search results.  Those questions don't play well with enforcing question and answer standards.   Both of that statements are easily verifiable and to my experience are just false.
106618
I posted an answer on a stackexchange site, and it was deleted by a moderator. Admittedly, the analogy I used was a bit of a stretch and apparently people didn't understand it, so the deletion is understandable. I would be happy to edit the answer and make it clearer, but I don't want to spend time doing so if there's no way to undelete it. Apparently I'm completely unable to undelete the answer, and I'm also unable to contact the moderator to discuss the situation with them. I can't even add comments because "This question is protected to prevent "thanks!", "me too!", or spam answers by new users."  Is it normal that an answer is deleted, the author is unable to do anything about it at all?
78182
I ask a lot of question on SO, so this recommendation/idea comes from that experience. I'm not really sure how this would fit in with the current structure of SE.   Oftentimes after asking a question, maybe after an hour or so, I end up finding the answer I needed somewhere. And it comes time for me to answer the most difficult question of all: do I delete this question, or do I keep it in case someone answers and others may benefit from it. The problem is, if I don't delete it and no one answers, my acceptance rate goes down. So usually I'll just delete it.  However, sometimes I fear that someone is typing a really really long answer to my question since itäs only been an hour, and so I imagine the nightmare that person experiences when they find out their essay will be gone to waste. Overall, this never-to-be-seen-again answer could have benefitted many people had the question remained.  Since SE has gone "live-happy" lately, where answers and comments refresh live, I thought it might be interesting if the original asker of the question (or anyone else for that matter) could see how many people are currently responding to the question (just count, not necessary to display their names). This way, if I know someone is replying, I won't delete the question, and others can benefit from it.
6505
Downvoted, unanswered questions have been subject to automatic deletion for a long time. The same is not true of downvoted answers.  On Super User, we have  posted before the beginning of this year still in existence. Over two thousand of those are scored at -2 or below, having been downvoted by multiple people.  I see no reason to keep these answers around. Based on the votes, they have helped nobody. They're just sitting there, being pointless, borderline-NAA, or otherwise bad. Low quality (but not flag-worthy) posts aren't actively harmful, but don't provide a good image for the site. Additionally, I think people would be a lot more likely to downvote bad things if they knew there was a good chance for the -1 to be refunded in the future if somebody else agreed. (And hey, the poster would get the -2 refunded as well.)  To prevent people from adding single downvotes to cause quick deletion of things they don't like, it would probably be good to require a score of at most -2 before an answer is eligible for auto-deletion. Accepted answers (that aren't self-answers) shouldn't be deleted, since they helped someone. A reasonable time frame for the deletion of -2 answers would be a month after they hit that score; the process would optimally be accelerated by additional downvotes and slowed significantly by any upvotes.  I understand now that some downvoted answers should stick around to show an example of something subtly bad. To prevent those from going away, the presence of numerous comments or somewhat-highly-upvoted comments could be a factor against deletion. I still believe that many downvoted answers are just mediocre/useless and not representative of any common misconception. (See the Super User search linked above.)  Of course, such deletion shouldn't apply to meta sites, where downvotes are overloaded. I think both child metas and Meta Stack Exchange should be excepted from answer auto-deletion.  Otherwise, please make the Community user delete negatively scored answers after a while.
7503
I feel like there's a problem with Stack Overflow, as the number of people prowling it increases.  Each question's answers are sorted by descending score and then by descending time of posting. This means that if a person sits down and answers a question in a long, thorough way, going through every nook and cranny, once they post their answer, it will already be one of about seven different ones, some of which have already been upvoted. This wouldn't be a problem if those answers were as thorough as the one this guy's posting, but they usually aren't. Some of them are downright wrong, some aren't even answers to the question asked because their poster didn't bother to read the question all the way through.  This causes a problem I like to call Stack Overflow's Fastest Gun in the West Problem. I've come to a point where I'd rather just send a short, simple, correct explanation, than to go and do some proper research, write a whole blog post about it or even make sure the code I post even compiles, just so it will be noticed, as opposed to the incorrect ones.  I'm sure I'm not the only one doing this and that it despairs many people from even trying to answer questions.  I've long ago learned to try to always raise a problem with a solution in hand, rather than just say "This is a problem, handle it," so my question, after this long tirade, is:     How do you think this can be changed? What would you change in Stack Overflow to make this problem go away without hurting the site?   I promise to vote on answers I like, even if it takes you a long while to post them. :)
118968
was originally asked August 9, and received answers. A month later, the OP  the question, invalidating the existing answers. I rolled it back, and left a comment to say that a new question should be opened, but the OP changed it back saying "There is no rule about it, so you can't edit my post."  There is also a bounty on this question, making things more interesting.  What are the guidelines on completely changing a question or rolling back changed questions? Was I out-of-line rolling back the question?  I have no desire to get into an edit war, so I'm not going to touch the question again. If a moderator wants to get involved, great.
40302
As a moderator I sometimes1 find myself needing to explain disassociation to a user, usually one who has tried to delete posts that he's belatedly realized are connected to him.  It'd sure be handy if I could link to a page in the Help Center instead of explaining it anew each time.  We have a page on how to delete an account, but not the less-drastic action of disconnecting a single post. I understand that this is not something we want to encourage people to do willy-nilly, as it must be done by an SE employee (we mods can't do it) and that's a hassle.  But I don't think having a page in the Help Center will, by itself, cause a surge of requests. I'll propose some language here in an effort to help out and not just ask for things.  Use it or not as you see fit. While this request comes from the &quot;insider&quot; knowledge of the solution, disassociation, I'm writing the topic from the &quot;outsider&quot; perspective, which is closer to &quot;aiieeeee, I shouldn't've posted that!&quot;. (I've belatedly become aware of , but mine is a little more specific so I'm posting it anyway.) 1 Three times this week, though fortunately that's unusually frequent.   I've thought better of my question; can I delete it? You may have had second thoughts about a question you've asked.  Maybe you don't want your coworkers to see that question about job-hunting, or you don't want certain family members to see just how much of an expert you've become on video games when they thought you were focusing on school.  We get it; Stack Exchange makes it easy to get good answers to your questions, so naturally you asked. If your question has answers, though, it's not fair to the people who wrote them for you to delete your question.  They put effort into helping you and even if you no longer want the answers, somebody else might.  This is why the system prevents you from deleting answered questions most of the time, and it's also why if you flag to request deletion the flag will probably be declined. However, you can request that a post you've made (question or answer) be disassociated from your account.  This means it will remain on the site, but it will no longer be attributed to you.  It won't show up on your profile, it won't have your name on it, and you won't get any reputation from it.  (You also won't be able to accept an answer later, because it's no longer your question, so do that now if you want to.)  Disassociation is irreversible, so make sure this is what you want. To request disassociation, use the &quot;contact us&quot; link at the bottom of the page.  In the form, say you want to disassociate a post and include the URL. While disassociation is permitted, this is meant to be an exception, not a routine action.  Please be respectful of people's time and do not abuse this.  A pattern of posting rashly and requesting disassociation, over and over again, could lead to suspension.
89010
On Software Engineering I've been adding a message along these lines to old(ish) questions that have enough answers to be CW if they start getting new answers.     Please read all of the existing answers before posting yours. The question is relatively old and has a reasonable number of answers already. There is a good chance that your answer has already been posted.   I know most people don't read dialogs and just click "OK" to get through them, but if we can stop a few people adding to such questions then it's got to be good right?  The age of the question and the number of existing answers required that trigger this message can be configurable.