I cannot delete my own question on Stack Overflow. When I try, I get the following error message:
Sorry, this question cannot be deleted: too many existing answers, or upvoted/accepted answers (click on this box to dismiss).
Meta Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for meta-discussion of the Stack Exchange family of Q&A websites. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this communityI cannot delete my own question on Stack Overflow. When I try, I get the following error message:
Sorry, this question cannot be deleted: too many existing answers, or upvoted/accepted answers (click on this box to dismiss).
Basically you can't. If you've asked a question and others have contributed answers which have been deemed valuable by the community, you can't delete the question because that would delete those valuable answers too.
Why do you want to delete the question? Maybe there's a better alternative, such as editing it to make it more useful.
-infinity
, but it should be at least enough downvotes to reduce the total rep gained with the question to 0 (in the case of obvious dupes). Otherwise people have no incentive to not make duplicates. After dissociation, any rep (gain or loss) would then be removed.
Jan 28, 2014 at 17:21
When it's not possible to have your question deleted, you can always ask for it to be unlinked from your account, so that it won't have your name under it.
This isn't obvious, and isn't usually suggested in response to the "Please delete my question" requests, so I thought it's worth posting this for those who come here via web search.
As the error message stated, you cannot delete it because there are too many answers, people have responded to your request.
If you really need it deleted for some reason I would suggest flagging it for moderator attention and explaining your rationale for needing it deleted.