Disallow deletion of questions for 24 hours after last answer was posted

Question

Currently, authors can't delete their own question

• if it has multiple answers
• if it has a single answer with one or more upvotes, even if it has a negative score
• if it has an answer with an awarded bounty

I ask that another criterion be added, to prevent authors from deleting their question within 24 hours of an answer being posted.

It happened to me, and to others as well, that a relevant question of reasonable quality was asked, some time consuming research went into creating an answer, and as soon as that answer was posted, the OP immediately deleted the question. This happens often with questions asked for work purposes, and some companies seem to generate many such short lived questions every day.

This behavior is hard to provide feedback on, or to moderate for multiple reasons:

• The community loses content (the question and the answer) without having a realistic time zone independent chance to notice or vote on it.
• There is no natural way to contact the OP without spamming unrelated questions.
• There is no way to flag the behavior as deleted questions are not flaggable by ordinary mortals
• The current UI does not discourage this behavior in any way, so it may not even be intentional.

Also, per Tim Post at the Meta Super User question:

We have things in place specifically to stop people from potentially wasting their time by answering questions. You can't delete your own question if it has multiple answers, or a single answer with a score of one or higher. That generally stops it, what remains is the edge case of great answers not getting a chance to see votes before being removed.

Addressing the edge case is very simple, however.

I believe that even a relatively short protection period is sufficient to ensure an upvote on any high quality answer; but, more importantly, habitual or intentional answer snatching will become less practical, and honest question posters will better understand the public purpose of the site.

(While this does make it a little harder to delete one's own question after the OP genuinely changed their mind, there is a plenty of better ways of stopping to make a fool of oneself: improving one's question through edits, self-answering it, asking the answer owner for cooperation on deletion, waiting a day before deletion, flagging the question for closure, or requesting to be dissociated from the post.)

Answer 1

If a question is truly valuable, there is a very limited window where it can be deleted. The current system is designed to allow for rubber duck instances, where the exercise of writing the question alone leads you to an epiphany that obviates the question. Some examples would be:

• Duh, I missed a (brace, semicolon, chance to have my morning coffee)
• I am totally solving the wrong problem here
• Wait, this code actually works, the problem has to be somewhere else

... or other scenarios where someone would like to avoid wasting other people's time needlessly. And that's what it boils down to, wasting other people's time. If it was an honest mistake, and there's really no value in keeping the question and possibly one answer around, then we chalk it up to things happen from time to time.

We also strongly encourage self-answers in lieu of closing or deleting if there's even a chance that the post could be beneficial to someone in the future. Many users opt for this, even in oh, duh! instances.

On the flip side of this, we will not tolerate someone asking a perfectly valid question, getting a great answer, then trying to remove all traces of it. It's understandable that some folks work under rather draconian policies either at work or school, but it's up to them to work around those suitably. Should this happen to you again, here is what you do:

• Flag it for moderator attention, select 'other' and let them know what happened
• Moderators will contact the community team and request that we disassociate the post from the original author's account
• The community team will do this, and restore the post, and possibly have a private chat with the question author if the moderators haven't.

We don't put up with toxic behavior anywhere, and this is no different.

I think that the real answer to this is making the disassociation of content a more self-service sort of feature, but there are numerous obstacles in front of making that a reality.

Tightening up deletions as proposed solves the narrower / rarer 'hit and run' problem, but could lead to a bit more wasted time in the benign cases where there really wasn't a problem to begin with, or it's nowhere in the scope of the original question.

I'm not declining this because I want to chew on it a bit more, but I think the key here is making it much easier for users to get their name off of certain contributions in a hurry, which seems to be the impetus for the rapid deletion. That just gets a little complicated.

The goal of course being minimizing wasted time as a whole.

Answer 2

Analysis

The problem here is that not everyone has the super-cow powers to see deleted posts. As a result, I recommend that you don't trust SO as the sole repository of your posts.

My Personal Solution

I edit all responses in Tomboy, and paste them into SO when I'm ready. That means I often lose out to "fastest gun in the west" responders, but it also means that I ultimately don't have to care what SO does with the data I post because I always have my own copy.

Answer Your Own Questions

If someone deletes a question to which you have a truly unique answer, there's nothing stopping you from asking (and answering) your own question. Just make sure that both the question and answer aren't duplicated elsewhere, or your posts will probably be flagged and/or deleted.

Answer 3

Questions can be undeleted, but somebody needs to have a handle to the question in order to vote, flag, or appeal on meta. Deleted questions aren't very discoverable, so if the person who answered doesn't know what to do about it, it'll probably stay deleted. It would be better to add a little friction to the deletion instead of cleaning up after a subset of these abuses.

A delay on delete votes after a new answer is posted would allow time for the community to vote. If the answer is good, one vote stops deletion. If the answer is not good, there's no harm in a little delay before removing the question and answer -- unless you're trying to hide your tracks from your professor, in which case that's your problem not ours.

How long should the delay be? Good question. Somewhere between a couple hours to a day or two, probably. The ideal answer might depend on the site, but even a fixed limit across the network is probably better than the loss of goodwill from people who contributed valuable content only to have it wiped out unilaterally. New users in particular won't know how to get it reversed, or even what happened. They'll just see their work...gone. Should we be surprised if they don't give us a second chance?

At a time when we're concerned about retention, I think it's worth trying a little harder to prevent this kind of answer deletion.

Answer 4

Based on the other answers here, I'll propose a slightly different version of what you mentioned:

• Allow the owner of the question to click 'delete', but if it is within 24 hours after an answer was posted, delay the actual deletion until 24 hours after the answer was posted. At that point, check the vote count on the answers. If any answer has any upvotes at that point, the deletion doesn't take effect; otherwise, it takes effect 24 hours after the answer was posted if the question is still eligible for deletion.

The benefits of this proposal are that it still allows question-owners to delete questions that they later realized are bad (e.g., a typo or something else where the question will never be useful again in the future); but it prevents askers who delete to prevent anyone else from seeing the answer.

This was inspired by Monica Cellio's answer, and is an attempt to balance the competing concerns and achieve (as much as possible) the best of both worlds.