To provide context:
- For a long while, there's been a feature where users who request deletion of their accounts and meet certain criteria for low activity have their account deleted immediately, rather than having to wait 24 hours for the request to be processed.
- Additionally, there's a feature where users who've cast a lot of votes will have their deletion request placed on hold for a staff member to review their voting record and determine if their votes should be preserved, because their votes would be removed otherwise, and this minimizes disruption. Normally, this ties in to the 24-hour timer: after the account is scheduled for deletion, once the timer lapses, it remains "stuck" until a staff member processes the deletion.
Last August, the criteria for having an account deleted immediately on the user requesting it were changed to not allow immediate deletion for users who've made one post on the site.
The previous criteria, however, didn't allow immediate deletion for users who'd cast more than one vote. On the other hand, the new criteria no longer check for number of votes cast, meaning that a user who's never posted but has voted on a lot of posts is now eligible for immediate deletion.
You might think that these cases could never overlap except in exceedingly rare cases: as the comment I linked above says:
You need at least 15 rep to vote, hard to get without posting (yes, you can make 7 suggested edits and get them approved, and then vote a couple of times and then delete your account, but that is a pretty extreme edge case).
However, it's not an extreme edge case, as that comment says. You can also vote using the association bonus, and while the answer there says that only users with "less than 101 rep" are eligible, a community member did some testing and found that accounts with 101 reputation are in fact deleted immediately, meaning that a user with the association bonus and no posts can cast a lot of votes, enough to require a staff review before deletion, but at the same time be eligible for immediate deletion. This wasn't possible with the previous criteria in any way, but is possible with the new criteria.
While such users (who cast a lot of votes but don't post) may be rare, and while the probability that their votes would not survive a staff review is higher, such cases can still exist.
What happens to users who request deletion of their accounts and meet the criteria for immediate deletion, but at the same time qualify for a staff review of their votes? Will the deletion be processed immediately (and all votes invalidated) without a wait or review? Will a timer show up on their profile as it would with the 24-hour timer, but with the date and time of expiration shown at the time of request rather than 24 hours later?
