Clarify that normal users cannot undelete questions deleted by moderators

Question

When moderators delete posts, they cannot be undeleted by non-moderators. The "undelete" link still appears for 10K+ users, though, but it produces an error tooltip when used. That fact doesn't seem to be mentioned in either the 10K privilege page or the 20K privilege page. The latter says something about answers torched by mods, but doesn't mention questions.

Please remove or clearly disable the "undelete" link for questions that we cannot actually vote to undelete. Alternatively, a note in the privilege pages would be good. It's bizarre that clicking the "undelete" link appears to work - it asks whether you really want to cast that vote - but only fails after you confirm.

Relevant: Allow community votes to undelete Q/A that a moderator has deleted.

Answer 1

Have you noticed that the "award bounty" UI is present even on deleted answers? That the "accept answer" checkmark is present even if the answer is too new for you to be allowed to accept it? That vote buttons are available even to people who don't have the upvote and downvote privileges? None of those controls are grayed out or disabled, either. At least it's consistent.

The reason for all of this, I was told when I asked about the bounty case, is that checking for the necessary preconditions for every UI element would noticeably affect page-load time. Rather than do all that checking for every UI element at load time, the engine instead does the check when you try to use one of those controls and then displays just-in-time documentation in the form of the big red pop-up of "no you can't do that; here's why". Yes, until you click you might be misled, but most people only need to see the pop-up once or twice and then they learn.

But wait, you might say -- I only see the "delete" (or "close") link at all when I have the privilege. If we can do that, why not have the undelete link be more dynamic? Two reasons: first, checking whether this user can vote to undelete (at all) is a one-time reputation check (not something to be checked for each deleted post), and second, checking whether this post can be undeleted is a more-expensive DB check because you need to join the post to the deletion event to the deleting users (three different tables) and then check for diamonds there. For something that comes up rarely, for a link that most of the time won't be clicked to begin with, that sure is a lot of pre-display computation.

I don't know what that pop-up says right now (when you vote to undelete something deleted by a mod). If it's not perfectly clear, let's improve it. I'm neutral on the question of adding this special case to the documentation; there are lots of special cases that aren't documented, and the documentation is short enough to read. But I don't think it's worth trying to change how/whether the link is displayed in the first place.

Update after question update: I hadn't realized that undeletion is a two-step process. Doing the eligibility check at the first step (when you get the "are you sure?" dialogue) would improve the usability and doesn't seem like it should be expensive. Yes, you can't do it entirely client-side, but you're pretty close to needing to ask the server anyway, so it doesn't seem harmful.

Answer 2

Removing the link will only leave 10K users asking "where did that link go?"… and documenting the dozens(?) of exceptional circumstances for every feature will make the system that much more complicated for everyone else to use.

I can appreciate the desire to "document everything", but I much prefer a style of just-in-time learning where you keep the system relatively consistent and easy to use… while only subjecting folks to these nuances on the rare occasion it comes up in actual practice.

I much prefer that to a mystery menu where you have to read through hundreds of posts just to find out how that darned thing is supposed to work. And when you pile every little bit of nuance into the system documentation, folks are even less likely to read it at all.

Answer 3

Yep. As it stands, there is certainly a discrepancy between the documentation on the privileges page and the actual behavior (or perhaps one might call it an "omission" rather than a discrepancy). The solution here is pretty straight-forward: update the privileges page to document the actual behavior when a user with the privilege attempts to vote-undelete a question which was deleted by a community moderator.

There's also the behavior itself of the undelete link which you've called into question. There are several paths to take RE: this behavior:

• Do nothing: leave it as-is, where attempting to undelete gets you an error message. Not, IMO, the most helpful, as the message can be a little confusing.
• Remove the undelete link entirely if the user can't undelete, or gray it out: This would be more helpful, in my opinion. If you remove the undelete link completely, it shows the user in no uncertain terms that that action is not available. If you gray it out, provide hover-over text explaining (perhaps more completely than the current text) why it's grayed out.
• Actually allow users to undelete posts deleted by a mod.
• Introduce a new feature allowing mods to choose whether to "soft-delete" or "hard-delete" a question or answer. A soft deletion leaves open the possibility of appropriately-privileged users to vote undelete the content. A hard deletion is to be reserved for cases where, in the moderator's judgment, there is no possible justification for ever undeleting the content (for example, spam content with no value whatsoever, offensive material, personal blogs, etc.) -- Once you introduce this new feature, you would be able to allow users to vote to undelete only those posts that have been soft-deleted, or flag posts that have been hard-deleted.

The advantage of adding the new feature as described in the last option is that it would actually reduce the workload on moderators when they soft-delete a question that's, say, off-topic, too localized, too broad, etc. which the community wants to try to sustain for some reason (great answers, editable into a good question, etc.) -- the moderator can literally ignore the vote-undelete process and just let the vote play itself out, either by not garnering enough votes, or getting the votes and being undeleted. If it gets undeleted, then the community has effectively told the moderator to leave it on the site.

This approach also leaves the door open for moderators to protect the site against harmful content, by giving them the hard delete option. They just have to exercise their judgment in determining when to hard delete. The guidance given to moderators should be that they should never hard delete something that could be edited into a decent question (if there's even a little kernel of somewhat topical, somewhat interesting information in the Q, and it's not offensive / spammy in nature, you'd just soft-delete).