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I expected this post to be automatically protected by Community after three answers were deleted:

However, that was not the case. Upon further investigation and some help from other mods , it appears that Community did not want to protect it because two of those posts were from deleted/destroyed users.

Presumably, this is not the intended behavior since those two users were automatically deleted by the maintenance script. This problem was brought up before but the accepted answer there says that spam deletions count towards the threshold.

Do (should?) deleted answers from users who have been auto-deleted count towards the auto-protection threshold?

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    Well, looks like a technical bug in the SQL. There is something like If (UserReputation1<50) And (UserReputation2<50) And (UserReputation3<50) Then (AutoProtect), however for deleted account the reputatioon is NULL, not zero, and as can be seen here, Null is not smaller than 50 hence the bug. Fix is as easy as If (IsNull(UserReputation1, 0)<50) ... as can be seen here.
    – Shadow The GPT Wizard
    Mar 1, 2016 at 18:59
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    @ShadowWizard a-ha! Nice catch. The Community auto-protect feature is most useful for exactly these types of answers (posts by throwaway accounts that get auto-deleted), so hopefully it can be corrected easily
    – JohnB
    Mar 1, 2016 at 19:18
  • @ShadowWizard if I understand correctly this bug has been already reported (and ignored) over two years ago, and about this time was said to be fixed for the case of spam deletions
    – gnat
    May 11, 2016 at 6:13
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    @sandwitch given above ^^^ you better be prepared that this will be ignored by Stack Exchange management despite bounties (your bounty on this question and mine on a similar one). To make it harder for them to ignore, suggest to "swap" after our bounties expire - I will put bounty on this question and you will put it on another one - to keep it "advertised" for longer time span. FWIW minimal bounty of 50 points at MSE seems to work just as good (or as bad:) in bringing community attention as 100 points
    – gnat
    May 11, 2016 at 6:19
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    @gnat this other post is not tagged as bug so it is off SE radar, not their fault. Hopefully, this one here will get official attention, even though it might take 6-8 months, or years.
    – Shadow The GPT Wizard
    May 11, 2016 at 7:38
  • @ShadowWizard For the purpose of protecting questions, nonexistent (i.e. deleted or doesn't have an account due to migration) users count as low rep since 15k users can protect any question with only one answer from such a user (even if the user used to have 100k rep). The problem is actually that system thinks that all nonexistent users are the same person (both have an ID of null). You can also see the system failing in this respect when sorting answers when a question and its accepted answer were both posted by nonexistent users.
    – Laurel
    Dec 8, 2018 at 20:40

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