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I'm new to this platform, please bear with me.

I answered a question on SO today, where the asker needed a specific SQL query. As soon as I had answered it and before anyone else could read or upvote it, the author deleted the question, rendering my answer useful to him but to no one else.

From what I read here on META, this has been a pattern of behaviour of some users for years, and it seems like nothing has been done to prevent the negative impact on people who make an effort to answer:

For me, this was the fourth or fifth question all in all that I answered on all of the SE platform, and I have to say, as a newbie, this is a really sobering start. The question was perfectly valid albeit pretty simple. The UI states clearly that the user deleted the question himself. I can only speculate on his reasons of course, but I strongly suspect that the question would still be open if I hadn't answered it.

Are there any plans to prevent this kind of lame behaviour with a technical solution? Since this problem seems to have existed for so long, I suspect no.

How do others here prevent this from happening to them? Are there any best practices you can recommend like waiting longer or commenting/upvoting before answering?

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    Please share a link to that answer that was deleted.
    – rene
    Jul 29, 2020 at 19:02
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    OMG it's even worse when the post is deleted or closed a minute before you answer it, having spent a half hour preparing an answer. But yes, it's a common pattern for a question to be deleted by OP when an answer is in comments. IMO a question should remain active for an hour after posting, unless flagged as spam, offensive etc.
    – Weather Vane
    Jul 29, 2020 at 19:02
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    "How do others here prevent this from happening to them?" I don't think that's possible. Although it's possible to vote to undelete questions if you gain enough reputation.
    – Mast
    Jul 29, 2020 at 19:02
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    above all, just make sure it's a question that would be useful to more than just the person asking it. If it isn't, it being not deleted isn't any different than it being deleted... it's helpin noone but the op. I wouldn't expect a "specific sql query" to be all that useful.
    – Kevin B
    Jul 29, 2020 at 19:03
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    A pattern of deleting questions after they get an answer but before the answer can be upvoted is a valid reason for a moderator to suspend someone - you should flag for moderator attention. The mod can also undelete the question if warranted.
    – ColleenV
    Jul 29, 2020 at 19:07
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    @rene: stackoverflow.com/questions/63159676/… And, yes, it was a simple question, and maybe there would have been reasons for moderators to to delete it later, but that's not what happened ...
    – HalvarF
    Jul 29, 2020 at 19:14
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    this is answered at MSO: "Deleted posts are mostly irrelevant to the question ban... The one exception involves deleting a question right after someone posts an answer to it. This (fairly rare!) pattern is seen as so overtly hostile that it does impose a pretty stiff penalty..." (ie user doing this more than once will likely be question banned)
    – gnat
    Jul 29, 2020 at 19:17
  • @user400654: I don't really see how the question being useful to others would have made it less probable that it was deleted by the asker himself. However, generally, that's good advice.
    – HalvarF
    Jul 29, 2020 at 19:19
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    It's an indicator of the asker's ability to formulate a useful question. People who put that kind of forethought into asking aren't (usually) going to be selfish like that
    – Kevin B
    Jul 29, 2020 at 19:20
  • @user400654 that's a good point.
    – HalvarF
    Jul 29, 2020 at 19:25
  • Does this answer your question? Question deleted while I was answering it
    – Bryan Krause
    Jul 29, 2020 at 19:54
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    @gnat Non-positively received questions count towards asking bans deleted or not. It's not that deleted posts are irrelevant except in the 1 case, they are still relevant; it's that whether posts were deleted is otherwise irrelevant. The phrasing in your linked post is misleading.
    – philipxy
    Jul 29, 2020 at 23:22
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    That question had zero research effort & was a Stack Overflow code question without a [mre] & is an easily found duplicate so should have been downvoted & close voted/flagged, not answered; and please minimize posting of code-only answers, explain how your code answers the question. Also this question can clearly be expected to be a duplicate, although I don't know how hard it would be to find, and you give some links.
    – philipxy
    Jul 29, 2020 at 23:29
  • @philipxy the phrasing of the whole post is indeed okay because it says that poorly-received posts count for ban. It is my quote that was incomplete sorry - I omitted this part in order to make a point that system penalises deletion of answered question even if it was received positively / neutrally
    – gnat
    Jul 30, 2020 at 5:02
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    @gnat Yeah, agree, I read the post, and I edited the part you quoted & I complained about. (Ha I got an 'Excavator' badge.)
    – philipxy
    Jul 30, 2020 at 5:07

3 Answers 3

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Content destruction is a pattern that can make a mod warn or suspend a user.

Please flag a moderator to let it know.

When your answer would get upvoted, such self-destruction are impossible to do, so it's why some user that want to really delete the question, for a reason up to them, delete fast the question.

For reference, it's my mod message menu, you clearly see the content destruction template already exist.

enter image description here

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    Why can't this list of behaviour be something that's exposed to users when they flag something for moderator attention? It's one thing to describe the problem in your own words (although the few times I've done this, I've wished the text limit wasn't so small), but it would be useful to have this kind of guidance in addition to that.
    – Jason Bassford
    Jul 29, 2020 at 19:39
  • I second the sentiment of Jason.
    – user1271772
    Jul 29, 2020 at 19:41
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    @JasonBassford Because those reasons are linked to templates for suspension messages that are usually only sent out if there is a pattern of behavior. That granularity isn't necessary for users flagging for a moderator where y'all can explain why you're flagging in the box.
    – ColleenV
    Jul 29, 2020 at 21:25
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    @JasonBassford I would prefer to enter free text and explain the issue as best as I can. I trust the moderators are capable of judging where something falls themselves. Exposing this list is just going to muddle things - a mod might be able to see something you're not able to. For example, flagging for plagiarism might be wrong. Some of those would distract users enough to be picked without even being relevant. I can just imagine the revenge downvoting reason being reported over and over, for example.
    – VLAZ
    Jul 30, 2020 at 5:11
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    @VLAZ I'm not suggesting that the free-form text should be replaced—just that it should be augmented with a list like this that would help people categorize their thoughts while typing their message. It would also be helpful if the current text-limit was expanded.
    – Jason Bassford
    Jul 30, 2020 at 14:21
  • @JasonBassford If you're flagging a message, presumably you already know why you're flagging it, don't you? Why would you need to categorize your thoughts? I don't understand what value an additional categorization step would add. From a former moderator's perspective, I don't want to get a mod flag with "revenge downvoting" and no explanation in the free-form text. I also don't think moderators need a lot of explanation in that box either - if it's that complicated, they should probably set up a private chat room to talk to the user to understand the situation better.
    – ColleenV
    Jul 30, 2020 at 18:21
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    @ColleenV What if I want to report somebody for quoting something without providing the source of the quotation—but I can't remember that the word for that is plagiarism? Having an easy reference would allow me to simply say plagiarism in the too-short amount of text I have to work with. The same with revenge downvoting. I might not know that's a common term for the action, and fumble around with expressing that somebody is out to get me instead of just stating it simply. In short, provide the simple terms—and then allow for more detailed explanation around that.
    – Jason Bassford
    Jul 30, 2020 at 20:49
  • @JasonBassford The options in the flagging dialog are not the most efficient place to teach people terminology. Maybe a better solution would be to flesh out the documentation that explains what sorts of things moderator flags should be used for and making that documentation easily accessible from the dialog.
    – ColleenV
    Jul 30, 2020 at 21:02
  • Pronoun "it" for a moderator??
    – This_is_NOT_a_forum
    Jul 31, 2020 at 9:08
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I'm sorry to say but that is not an awesome question you picked. There are comments that should set off alarm bells. And answers that go try this and then a blob of code or SQL are really not the type of content the community is aiming for. Explain what your code does, why it behaves this way, how the problem description from the question links to your solution.

So I urge you to not follow this advice for the specific case but more as general guidance for the future.

On Stack Overflow a lot questions and answers get deleted. Over 500,000 in the last 6 months. There is an automatic process that scoops up all posts that don't meet the threshold. Beyond that there are reviewers and users with delete privilege that will vote to delete content that doesn't meet our standards. Last but not least there is the question asker that can delete their question and the answer with it as long as the answer is not accepted and/or has a positive score. Deletion of content is real, happening and to be expected. See also the FAQ.

If you run into a case where a question is deleted the moment you posted an answer and you're 100% confident that both the question and the answer will be useful for future visitors (valuable content is lost) then you can raise a custom moderator flag where you explain that a valuable question and answer is deleted and that you request the question and its answer are undeleted. Keep in mind that the moderator might have no clue what SQL is and what is awesome about your answer and the question. You have to provide enough hints for them to believe you are to do some research on it. Focus on the value of the content that is lost, not on the behavior of the asker or your own frustration about the wasted time and effort.

For reference: Over the lifetime of Stack Overflow (since 2008) 1,208,607 questions have been deleted within 60 seconds after an answer was posted. Yes, that is an annoyance but in the grand scale of things on SO not a huge number. I doubt this topic is going to be addressed soon with a technical solution. Until then, trying to educate / coach / train / teach / guide the members of our community what is expected from them might be easier, healthier for the community at larger and more sustainable.

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    I hope you understand that I didn't raise this issue here because I found my answer to this specific question so extremely valuable. The question took me a few minutes to answer, mostly to help the guy. What annoyed me about this was the prospect of someting like this happening more in the future, for more time-consuming answers. Your answer, specifically about the point that very many questions are deleted on SE every day, actually makes me rethink even more if I should be willing to spend more time in the future contributing. So thanks for the discouragement at the right time! (I mean it.)
    – HalvarF
    Jul 29, 2020 at 20:07
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    @HalvarF Creating a content generating website is not hard, curating good content over a longer period is the trick and we're pretty good at it. What it needs is that both askers and the experts that answer agree on which content is valuable for future visitors and by definition that means a lot of stuff isn't a good fit here. By no mean my answer was meant as discouragement. I had hoped I gave you context and a direction to which you could prevent a similar experience. Here is the data I used to support my answer data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1268959
    – rene
    Jul 29, 2020 at 20:18
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How do others here prevent this from happening to them? Are there any best practices you can recommend like waiting longer or commenting/upvoting before answering?

One might simply repost the question if the OP removed it (with proper attribution), as it's allowed by the license. This way one doesn't have to monitor the OP's future behavior. Note that you can ask for a >10k rep user (or a >3k rep user on beta websites), or a mod, to retrieve the question if you can't access it anymore.

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    Thanks for your answer, I think that might actually be helpful, not for this particular case, but to know that this would be possible in future cases.
    – HalvarF
    Jul 29, 2020 at 20:11
  • @HalvarF Note that you can ask for a >10k rep user (or a >3k rep user on beta websites), or a mod, to retrieve the question if you can't access it anymore.
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Jul 29, 2020 at 20:16
  • Is there policy on whether this is accepted behaviour or not? Your answer seems ill received.
    – Mast
    Jul 30, 2020 at 6:48
  • @Mast I'm not aware of any policy against it, so I don't see why it wouldn't be allowed. No idea why the downvoters are thinking, I guess they are too shy to write comments.
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Jul 30, 2020 at 6:50

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