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Sorry if this is perhaps a duplicate of an already answered question. I am very curious of the purpose of being blocked from deleting answers after the limit of 5 daily deletions have been reached?

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    This is probably to prevent rage-quitting.
    – Aaron Bertrand Staff
    Commented Oct 2, 2013 at 21:03
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    I believe it is mostly to prevent people from rage-quitting/vandalizing their posts by deleting too many too quickly. I guess the question for you is why do you want to delete more than 5 in a day?
    – psubsee2003
    Commented Oct 2, 2013 at 21:04
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    There is no need to really delete old answered questions, I guess for the fact that some people like to clean up answers that are old and not rated.
    – hwnd
    Commented Oct 2, 2013 at 21:06
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    @hwnd "not rated" <> "useless and should be deleted."
    – Aaron Bertrand Staff
    Commented Oct 2, 2013 at 21:20

1 Answer 1

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Ragequits and other forms of abuse.

We've had more than a few people get upset about something and decide to start just deleting everything they've ever written. This can be incredibly disruptive, not to mention tedious to repair.

If you hit the limit, a mod-flag is raised as well - they'll look at your activity and see if it's a symptom of a larger problem.

If you're just cleaning up old answers that don't add anything useful to the other answers on the same questions, don't worry about it.

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    Care to explain symptom of a larger problem? And yes I was mainly referring to just cleaning up answers that are really not useful compared to other answers.
    – hwnd
    Commented Oct 2, 2013 at 21:10
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    I mean that most folks don't start deleting a bunch of well-regarded answers for no reason. If they're involved in a dispute with someone else on the site (just for instance), that's something that'll need some attention.
    – Shog9 Mod
    Commented Oct 2, 2013 at 21:13
  • Ok I can see how that would affect some people, and the fact of reputation.
    – hwnd
    Commented Oct 2, 2013 at 21:15
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    Beyond that, this sort of "taking my ball and going home" attitude hurts The Internet - useful information is now gone, links are broken, questions are unanswered. This is one reason why everything posted here is CC-Wiki licensed: no one, not us, not the author, gets to unilaterally "take back" something that has enriched the programming community.
    – Shog9 Mod
    Commented Oct 2, 2013 at 21:17

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