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Meta is different. Negatively scored questions are not always bad questions, and sometimes they have merit and draw good answers, especially discussions.

When an account (in the main site) is deleted, either by self deletion or by a moderator, all questions with score of -1 or less are being deleted regardless of their answers, both in the main and meta site.

Can you please change this behavior so that the questions on the per-site meta will survive and won't be auto-deleted?

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    If this is implemented, there should be a reminder to moderators when deleting so they can go look at those questions and delete the crappy ones. Something simple like "This user has negatively scored questions on Meta. Consider reviewing them before deleting the user."
    – animuson StaffMod
    May 11, 2014 at 15:48
  • @animuson why "before"?
    – John Dvorak
    May 11, 2014 at 16:16
  • @Jan Well once you delete the account you lose that nice list of all their questions and answers in one place. Unless you had links to them, they're impossible to track down by user.
    – animuson StaffMod
    May 11, 2014 at 16:21
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    @animuson an alternative would be to auto-generate said list upon account deletion.
    – John Dvorak
    May 11, 2014 at 16:22
  • Can you show a few examples of when it would actually be beneficial to keep those questions in practice?
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    May 11, 2014 at 16:45
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    Not just questions -- keeping a record of a negatively-scored answer (yeah, the community totally opposed that idea...) can be even more valuable than keeping questions.
    – Monica Cellio
    May 11, 2014 at 17:24
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    @Adam random example. Valid support question with a good answer, if it will be deleted, useful content will be lost.
    – Shadow The GPT Wizard
    May 11, 2014 at 17:41
  • @animuson agreed about the reminder, can be before or after like Jan suggested.
    – Shadow The GPT Wizard
    May 11, 2014 at 17:42
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    @AdamLear Many declined feature requests have negative scores, as well as answers explaining why this is a bad idea. If they are lost to auto-deletion, someone will again be explaining about cross-site privileges, mods marking answers as accepted, voting on question titles, privileges for inactive users, and so on...
    – user259867
    May 11, 2014 at 18:51
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    @user147263 worth to mention that question with negative score and without upvoted answer also gets auto deleted after a while by automatic process.
    – Shadow The GPT Wizard
    May 11, 2014 at 19:43
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    @AdamLear Yes, definitely.
    – Rand al'Thor
    Mar 23, 2016 at 18:08

2 Answers 2

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Negatively scored posts on per-site metas as well as Meta Stack Exchange will no longer be auto-deleted upon profile deletion. Destroying a user will still delete all the posts as normal.

We've also added a simple page which will list all of the posts which were attached to a now-deleted profile - linked from the user deleted stub moderators see when attempting to view that user.

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    Holy smoke! Must admit, never really believed this will done. Can't thank you enough! :)
    – Shadow The GPT Wizard
    Apr 12, 2016 at 6:20
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    Thank you for this and for the forthcoming moderator access to deleted users' posts! Not being able to find those has sometimes been a problem, particularly when trying to handle serial creators of throwaway accounts. (Given the posts we can get to the flags, for example.)
    – Monica Cellio
    Apr 12, 2016 at 15:07
  • "We are also planning to implement a simple page which will list all of the posts which were attached to a now-deleted profile - linked from the user deleted stub moderators see when attempting to view that user." - any update? :)
    – hichris123
    Sep 12, 2016 at 0:21
  • @hichris123 yeah, it's done now.
    – Shadow The GPT Wizard
    Dec 9, 2016 at 6:57
  • @hichris123 go to the deleted user's page (the one that shows who deleted it and when, and other useful info), and you'll now see the link to that user's posts. (Separate operations for main and meta.)
    – Monica Cellio
    Dec 9, 2016 at 15:46
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Yes. Yes. Yes. Please change this behaviour.

On the main site, deletion of negatively-scored posts by deleted users is all well and good: no point keeping crappy content around when the user themselves isn't on the site any more.

But on the meta site, it can cause problems. There, "negatively scored" isn't the same as "crappy"; and users such as spammers who get quickly deleted don't often acquire enough rep to post to meta. Someone might have posted an unpopular suggestion or feature request which, although declined, is still useful to link back to; this should still be available to the community if the user quits.

Note that answers as well as questions fall prey to the auto-deletion scourge.

A recent example has caused a certain amount of havoc on Science Fiction & Fantasy. A user went from being a very active and valuable meta contributor years ago to rage-quitting and deleting his account last month over accusations of mod abuse. He'd posted several answers to a very important meta discussion on the site's scope in 2011, and three of these had been heavily downvoted, reflecting the fact that those types of question were decided to be off-topic. I only recently discovered that these answers had been auto-deleted, and had to undelete all three of them so that we still had a clear record of decisions on the site's scope - a pretty important thing to have, you must agree.

There could be many other useful negatively-scored posts by this user which have been auto-deleted and which I haven't yet found in order to undelete them. This is not a good state of affairs.

(more-or-less copied from my duplicate question here)

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