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The way things usually work is that if an answer has a positive score, it can't be deleted by non-mods - neither by manual delete votes (which aren't even available until the score is negative) nor via the review queue (which only shows "Recommend Deletion" rather than "Delete" as an option if the post's score is positive).

Exhibit 1: this answer (only visible to those with >10k rep on SFF). Screenshot:

positive score, deleted by 3 high-rep users, flagged as "has a good score but received delete votes"

This post has a positive score (+1), yet it was somehow deleted by three ordinary (non-mod) high-rep users. There's even an auto-flag, indicating that the system understands that it isn't supposed to work like this: normally we get a moderator flag on any post that has had delete votes via review queues but can't be deleted due to its positive score, so that mods can check whether the post needs deleting via diamond powers, but in this case it was deleted even without diamond powers (but the flag was still raised)!

In the review queue, both of the last two delete votes (the first user apparently voted to delete outside of the queue, and possibly when the post had a negative score) show as "Delete" rather than "Recommend Deletion". That definitely isn't how it used to work.

I'm tagging this as because, even if it's intended behaviour due to some update in the way delete votes work (see also this recent post), certainly the system shouldn't both allow deletion without mod powers and raise a custom mod flag implying that it doesn't.

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    Curiouser and curiouser: the post now has a score of 0, despite being at 1 when I took the screenshot after deletion.
    – Rand al'Thor
    Commented Nov 11 at 16:08
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    I'd bet it was a vote invalidation (or account deletion). Which removed the upvote and allowed the actually zero-scored post to be deleted, but the score didn't get rebaked for some period of time which made it appear it was still positively scored. Why the mod flag appears though is an interesting interaction.
    – Henry Ecker
    Commented Nov 11 at 17:02

1 Answer 1

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They can't. What happened was actually a result of our automatic vote invalidation system.

The short of it is, the answer did have a score of 0 at the time it was deleted. There was previously a downvote on the answer, but the downvote was auto-invalidated a few hours prior to that. For performance reasons, we do not recalculate the scores of all involved posts when we invalidate votes this way and let them get recalculated at a later time.

Because the deletion itself triggered an auto-downvote by the Community user, this also caused the score to get recalculated. I'm not sure why it ended up with a score of 1 as the final in the column (as it should be at 0 now) - there may have been some sort of race condition with recalculating the score there.

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    Thanks, this sort of clears things up. The only weird thing still outstanding is that the auto-flag for "has a positive score but received delete votes" was still raised by the system (this is normally useful for when the community is voting to delete a post and can't actually delete it) even though the deletion actually went through. Essentially, I was looking at an answer that was deleted but was also flagged because it couldn't be deleted!
    – Rand al'Thor
    Commented Nov 12 at 9:16
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    @Randal'Thor Yes, that's an unfortunate side-effect of it somehow ending up at a score of 1 during the race condition. The auto-flag gets raised if the score is greater than the threshold at the time the review is completed and it wasn't completed by a moderator - it doesn't check to see if the post otherwise got actually deleted somehow. But afaik this odd condition is the only way that situation could occur.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Nov 12 at 16:25

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