Regular users should be able to vote to undelete moderator-deleted posts

Question

When a moderator deletes a post, nobody except a diamond moderator can undelete that post. There is a pretty good reason for this behaviour, as before this was implemented it happened rather regularly that a user would simply undelete their post after it was deleted by a moderator, without fixing any of the problems that caused the deletion. Undeletion is also pretty silent, so this was an issue that needed to be solved.

But I do think that the actual implementation is missing the goal somewhat and causes some undesirable behaviour in edge cases.

The behaviour that we need to prevent is post owners undeleting their own posts deleted for moderation purposes, which is very different from preventing any regular user from undeleting any post deleted by a moderator, which is the currently implemented behaviour.

The issues caused by the current behaviour compared to what I think is the actually desired behaviour are:

• The community user is also a moderator, so its deletions are irreversible. But deletions by an automatic script are a pretty good example of decisions that should be reversible by regular users voting to undelete

• Close votes by moderators are intentionally made reversible by regular users. This is a very good design in my opinion that avoids having to escalate any disagreement between mods and community, and also allows the community to easily fix mistakes made by moderators. Deletion votes should be handled the same way, the community should be able to overturn any moderator deletion unless the moderator intentionally locks the post to prevent this. Sometimes it is necessary to override the community by locking, but in my opinion this should always be an explicit choice by the moderator, and not a side effect.

• A post deleted for moderation reasons by several regular users should also be protected from the owner simply undeleting it with one click.

So what I propose is to change the whole behaviour to match the desired outcome. Post owners should only be able to undelete with one vote if they themselves deleted the post. If anyone else, moderator or not, deleted the post, the owner would have no special power to undelete.

Answer 1

I just ran into this, trying to vote to undelete a moderator-deleted post that was edited to fix the problem that led to its deletion. I think that the moderator probably did the right thing by deletion - I'm a huge proponent of fast deletion of posts that aren't good examples of questions or answers since it gives the opportunity to edit them while stopping a potential flood of downvotes. However, it needs to be something that the community can override without needing to flag for another moderator to handle.

I will add some additional suggestions:

• It should take more user votes to undelete a moderator deletion than any other deletion. If it takes 5 user votes to delete a post and 5 user votes to undo that, it should take something like 7 user votes to undo a moderator deletion. The review queues can facilitate this.
• If users do vote to undelete a moderator-deleted post, consider generating an automatic flag after undoing the deletion so the moderators can see it and confirm. The reasons for deletion may not have been fully addressed. Also, if there is a delete/undelete war happening, a moderator can opt to lock the post, similar to how frequent edits trigger flags.