Disallow voting from accounts which are pending deletion?

Question

If a user's account is scheduled for deletion (i.e. they've submitted a formal request for account deletion, but the button hasn't actually been pressed yet), can they be prevented from voting?

I can't see any reason why such a user should be allowed to continue casting votes on the site. They've already decided that they're soon going to be a non-user, and they won't be able to vote at that point anyway; and if they really want to continue voting, all they have to do is cancel the deletion.

On the other hand, there are sometimes good reasons why they shouldn't be allowed to vote in this period. In many cases (not all), a user deleting their account is in the middle of some sort of "rage quit", and an obvious thing for a ragequitting user to do would be to leave a bunch of downvotes before they go, as a form of hitting on the break. If they do it soon enough before the deletion, they might even be able to get away with doing things which would normally be reversed by the serial voting algorithm. Or, worse, they could unaccept answers to all their questions - downvotes can be invalidated by SE employees, but nobody except the OP can re-add checkmarks to answers. For that matter, even the standard ragequitter practice of deleting all their posts could count as a sort of voting - it's disabled during account suspension, so why not during pending deletion periods too?

Answer 1

First, I should note that the person who motivated this question threw their tantrum before scheduling deletion, so this wouldn't have helped - by the time they were scheduled, they were also suspended everywhere, which achieved the same effect.

Also, some of the scenarios you're outlining are already addressed today:

• Low-activity accounts lose all of their votes upon deletion anyway, precisely because they have insufficient activity for us to reliably distinguish abuse from normal behavior.

• High-activity accounts get manually reviewed, usually by me. Depending on the situation, I will either invalidate serial voting or simply delete the user and all of their votes together.

• Mass-deletion is rate-limited, and can trigger automatic flags on top of that. There's a balance here between tying the hands of folks who just want to tidy up their accounts and blocking vandals, but we've tweaked the triggers enough over the years to be reasonably sane.

• Up- and down-voting is also rate-limited, so the damage you could do on one site in one day is limited to 40 votes up or down.

• Vote retraction is locked after a few minutes unless the post is edited; this makes it pretty hard to mass-retract votes without signalling to everyone on the site what you're doing.

That just leaves rage-unaccept. This is kinda borderline; our broad philosophy here has been that accept is at the asker's discretion and totally optional, so there's less call for strict limits on it. Additionally, you'd need to have asked and accepted answers to a whole lot of questions for this to be particularly disruptive. That said, I could see putting some generous rate-limits on this.

Finally, I should note that it's possible for moderators to suspend accounts pending deletion, and for employees (who generally trigger the deletions in the first place) to suspend an account network-wide. While a manual process, this does provide sufficient tooling to stop the bleeding in cases where the above-mentioned restrictions are insufficient.

If we ever get to the point where more is necessary, I suspect automatically suspending accounts pending deletion would be a simple solution, but I'm in no hurry to do that.