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I have this question that's lost me 27 rep, and I know we cannot delete answered questions. However, it prompted me with

Are you sure you want to delete this question? It has answers. Repeated deletion of answered questions results in a question ban.

I know it's wrong to delete answered questions, but this questions seems to be just to humor the community and I lost nearly the same rep as the only answerer gained so I thought not much harm done. I thought it's a new feature where you can delete answered questions, but apparently not.

Why is a popup necessary, then, if we cannot delete them in the first place?

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  • I agree, this is a bug, pure and simple. Furthermore, I think the restriction should be removed for negative-score questions, since that basically means the community considers the question not actually valuable.
    – user3840170
    Commented Nov 13, 2022 at 8:12

1 Answer 1

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Why is a popup necessary, then, if we cannot delete them in the first place?

To explain why you perhaps shouldn't delete them.

See, the message that explains that you can't delete the question also advises you to flag for moderator attention if you have a good reason for wanting it deleted anyway.

Unfortunately, a whole lot of folks don't have good reasons for wanting this stuff deleted. Or at any rate, they can't manage to elaborate on these reasons in the flags they raise for moderators. And so they keep flagging them until we get really irritated and/or oblige them by deleting the post.

So the first message tries to give folks a good reason to not go about deleting all their stuff. If you know better than the stupid machine displaying the message, you can click right on through and find out about getting a moderator involved.

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