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A useful question recently appeared on SO about DI constructor injection in Scala 2.8, and I provided what I think was a useful answer. However, the question disappeared soon after I submitted my response (apparently deleted by its author?).

It seems inherently unfair that an author can unilaterally delete a question after others have answered it (unfair both to the responders and to the rest of community). It should at least require votes from other users, or there should be a built-in process that allows responders to see and vote to re-open the question.

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Instant question deletions are already prevented if there are upvoted answers. If that is the case, the question has to be closed first by 5 users with sufficient reputation before it can be deleted.
Of course moderators can also instantly delete questions on the posters request.

I think the instant deletion in the absence of upvoted answers (as well as the deletion through mods) is useful if you:

  • have posted a absolutely useless/weird question due to bad mood or lack of coffeine
  • are completely misunderstood by other users and heavily downvoted/attacked
  • ...

In such cases you shouldn't be forced to carry that question around with you for all times.

I sometimes also see interesting questions being deleted though, probably because the author realized what he was doing wrong. If you really think its going to help other people, just consider reposting the question yourself.

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    Hmm, maybe it shouldn't be possible to delete a question with any answers until some time has passed to allow upvotes. In this case, the question had only been up for ~19 minutes, and my answer was probably submitted less than a minute before the question was deleted. I don't know if the OP even knew an answer was submitted.
    – anovstrup
    Commented Aug 14, 2010 at 17:05
  • I have recently come back after a decent absence and answered two questions only to have them deleted seconds after the OP fixed their problem. It's annoying and downright rude. Can we do anything to stop this happening, I doubt anyone wants to spend time answering soemthing well to have it deleted (EG stackoverflow.com/questions/18555897/…)
    – Fluffeh
    Commented Sep 1, 2013 at 6:56
  • I was recently answering a HUGE question with lots of code, many pointers to make in the answer relating to the question. However, after typing for 10 mins and still going the "question is closed" appeared at the top. There's probs no ideal resolve, as such I sucked it up and moved on, but I have to admit it was very frustrating to be spending a large chunk of my own time to help someone greatly (and others and Stack considering the contents of the answer) only to have all that thrown away. Again, not sure of a resolve. It happens to me so little I've not even considered any ideas...
    – James
    Commented Sep 7, 2013 at 16:12

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