Preventing misuse of question self-deletion

Question

Users have the ability to self-delete their questions, as long as no upvoted answer exists. There are two major patterns of misuse of the ability to delete your own questions:

• Deleting a question immediately after it was answered, the answer has not enough time to receive an upvote and prevent deletion.
• Deleting closed or heavily downvoted questions and reasking them mostly unchanged.

These patterns are harmful to the community as they can delete useful content or hide that a user is reasking a bad question multiple times. The only mechanisms against these currently are the automatic question ban and manual intervention of users that observe these patterns.

I'm proposing some new methods or adjustments of existing ones to prevent these harmful self-deletion patterns:

To prevent the immediate deletion of questions after they are answered, there are two possible solutions:

• Only allow deletion after a specific delay from the creation time of the answer, so that the answer has enough time to receive some votes and the associated protection from deletion.
• Prohibit deletion of questions with answers of a non-negative score. This would immediately protect questions that were just answered and still allow deletion if the answer is downvoted. Could be gamed by the asker downvoting themselves, if they have the privilege.

To prevent the misuse of self-deletion to reask the same bad question I propose a new automatic community flag "Consecutive self-deleted posts", similar to the consecutive closed questions. I don't have any hard data, but I would suspect that benign self-deletion of two questions in a row is very rare, and there wouldn't be too much noise caused by this flag.

Answer 1

We have other time delays in the system (for voting to delete, accepting an answer (longer for self-answer), and for protecting a question), so a time delay on self-deletion would be consistent. The tricky part here is that the delay is based on the time of the first answer, not on the post itself. This seems possible (the data is there), but I'm not an SE developer. One would hope that self-deletions are infrequent enough that an extra server call (if needed) to determine its legality wouldn't be too burdensome.

As noted in the question, a restriction that a question with a 0-score answer can't be self-deleted can be gamed by a user who's picked up some rep. If he got the rep the slow way you would hope he'd be past such bad behaviors, but (a) we've all seen cases where that isn't true and (b) an association bonus carries you most of the way to the downvote privilege.

Alternatively, we could require that -- just as with votes to delete from other users -- a question must be closed first. Closing requires assistance from other users and/or moderators, so the asker wouldn't be able to close and then delete his question on his own.

For cases where a question really ought to be deleted quickly, there's always flagging.

Answer 2

I agree with the problem that this proposal attempts to solve. However, I only really like one metric.

Prohibit self-deletion of questions with answers of a non-negative score.

I think that this encompasses the 0 score, an answer was present, scenario. This seems to be the largest issue raised with self deletions (that a valid answer was provided and then subsequently deleted).

The point made as a disadvantage (that the OP will just downvote and then delete) could be gamed. However, that does require the reputation hurdle of 125 which I believe is a significant amount. By then, users probably will not follow the pattern of removing their content. The benefit is that all the users below 125 reputation (which probably encompasses a decent swath of the user base following this deletion pattern) will now no longer be able to quickly delete their question if an answer is posted.

Answer 3

What if a self-delete question with any answer gets translated to a (non-binding) delete-vote instead (similar to how self-close votes work). However, the further delete votes on this question aren't subject to the 48hr delay or -3 score rules normally required.

This'll mean that 10k+ users can clear the question if upon review the OP isn't trying to do a hit and run with an answer. (nb: I suppose upon deletion it would need to be considered a self-delete vote rather than a community delete vote though...)

After n many hours/days the delete votes (either all, or just the OP's) expire, and the OP's delete vote becomes binding again (subject to normal rules).

If it really needs to be deleted, then the OP's last resort is to flag for moderator attention and explain why they think the question and answer aren't of value (or something).

Answer 4

Comming from here: Request for minimum time and/or moderation attention before an Answered Question can be deleted and I have to add the problem of possible "rights" of the question that can be stolen by the OP of the question without the person who answer even get a notification that his post has been deleted.(and of course, no way to prove his rights on the stolen code). Sorry that didn't comment instead of answering but a have to add this problem (the problem of the "rights and/or copyrights" of our own code that we share and almost always offer as open source and free in the community, but we have no way to protect again patents or use in proprietary software). I think the problem is really specific, important and can not be ignored from SE, that already gives some cc and thus copryright to our code by default.

Non voted answers means nothing even after enough time. This answer got its first vote after 6 months and after linked in 4-5 other answers of mine... and after used at least 25-20 times... (It was answer in an old post but...)

This got its first upvote three or more months later even if it was the only answer... even if it was solving the problem... even if it could be a tiny package...

There are more examples but that was what came to my mind right now.

If coding and offering our code through SE to the community can't really guarantee that our code will not be used from the OP to prevent as from using it... Then all of us have to think again about what we are doing...

Answer 5

The proposed solution sounds tempting, but I think it is the wrong approach. Sure, there are situations where "self deletion" is misused, but forcing questions to stay up isn't a good answer to that.

Because it enables another, most likely worse problem.

Assume you are a newbie. Or even an experienced user. You ask something. And within one minute, it dawns on you that your question is of zero value. Maybe because of a downvote, or maybe because of a comment. Or maybe because you just read your own content, do a self-face-palm "oh stupid me, that's nonsense". Then, the ability to immediately delete your own input prevents others from wasting their time.

If you are now forced to wait 24 hours ... that means other users have 24 hours to waste their time on that content. But here is no point in reading that question. There is no need to vote on it. There is no need to comment again.

Honestly, I do the exact opposite. From time to time, when you tell a new user "this request here is off topic, you have to rework it, or delete it", and they just go in and delete asap ... when that happens, I turn to their profile, and when I find a entry worth upvoting there, I upvote. Just to tell them: "thanks for taking out your garbage yourself".