Can something be done to prevent delete votes when a question has reopen votes or is being discussed on meta?

Question

I saw this question where the OP was asking why his question got closed as "not constructive". I edited the question into something more "constructive" and it had a few reopen votes, but while I was writing up an answer to the meta question I discovered the question had been deleted by 3 community members. This all happened in under an hour.

I don't think we should be deleting someone's question so quickly when they bring it up on meta, particularly when the question isn't terrible and other users are attempting to help them correct the problem and get the question reopened.

And it certainly isn't a very good way to welcome new meta community members when they come here asking about one of their questions to try to understand the system better.

Would there be any way prevent a question from getting deleted by the community during a reopen attempt, or when there is a recent (< 24h?) meta post that contains a link to the question?

This isn't the first time I've worked to try and get a question reopened, and it's been deleted by the community midway through the process.

Answer 1

I don't feel very strongly about this, other than that it would make deletion even more complicated than we've already made it. I do feel that a single re-open vote is too low of a barrier - at 250 reputation, you can cast re-open votes on your own questions, so this would effectively give you the option of preventing them from being deleted for an indeterminate amount of time (however long it takes to age the reopen vote). Also, it probably doesn't make sense to further restrict the asker's ability to delete his own closed, unanswered question.

So with that in mind, here are some numbers:

• 589 questions deleted with more than one pending reopen vote (125 by moderators)
• 1104 questions where a delete vote has been cast when there was more than one pending reopen vote.
• 709 questions that were eventually deleted after a delete vote was cast while there was more than one pending reopen vote (151 by moderators)
• 2176 delete votes cast on questions with more than one pending reopen vote

This is for all time on Stack Overflow^*. In the past 90 days, 121 questions have been deleted where at least one delete vote was cast while there were at least two reopen votes pending on the question (30 of these were deleted by moderators). If you're over 10K reputation on SO, you can view them:

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^{*Data on re-open votes is only available from 2009, with slightly less history for delete votes. Realistically, "all time" probably means something closer to "the past three years" here.}

Answer 2

Unfortunatly this would actually put a damper on some much needed cleanup actions. For example on one site I mod, we have a troll that upvotes all the junk, and they have enough rep that they can actually VTO. It doesn't seem to matter much what the question is, how bad or even offensive it is, everything we close pretty much gets one vote to open. Even in less extreme cases, it's quite common for an OP to vote to reopen their own post, often before even editing as requested.

Basically what I'm saying is that your suggest would pretty much leave a deadlock on a whole bunch of cleanup work that realy does need to continue. If a particularly disputed post comes up that gets taken to meta, a mod needs to lock the post to allow the discussion to finish. However at some point life needs to go on. Mods and constructive users need to be able to get on with their lives even if one or two contrary folks are always pulling the other way.

The requirement to have several votes to delete, and needing much higher rep levels than to VTO is already a good balance.

Answer 3

The question will always be soft deleted, not hard deleted, so if it really contains valuable content then the question will get undelete votes, especially if there is an active meta discussion about the question to bring the attention of lots of high rep/mod users to the question. The fact that the deletion you are describing is taking place after the meta question likely means that these users have evaluated the question and come to the opposite opinion as you; that it should be deleted and not re-opened.

When deleting a question you are asserting that you feel it's not possible for it to be improved such that it should be re-opened, which means that the fact that the OP is trying to get the question re-opened need not block deletion. If the meta question helps guide the OP through such substantial improvements in their question asking skills that they are able to design an appropriate question it's almost certainly best that they just ask a new question anyway, if the first question was so bad that it needed to be deleted (and not just closed).

Answer 4

For the case of questions being discussed on meta, you seem to be asking for questions not to be deleted if they are "controversial".

That could be done if there was a new [on-hold] reason of "Controversial: it is not clear whether this question is suitable; it is currently under discussion". A question on-hold for that reason could be protected from deletion but would otherwise be like other on-hold questions. A question placed on-hold for that reason could have a [meta] question automatically created for it, where the discussion could take pkace.

If the requested feature for voting to keep a question open were implemented, having many votes to open and many votes to close could automatically trigger placing the question on-hold for this reason.