Stop an edited deleted answer from bumping the question

Question

I just answered this question, then deleted the answer because I realized what I said had already been covered. After deleting, I editing in a note saying why I deleted it, but that edit bumped the question on the home page.

I assume that the question will get bumped if I undelete the answer (which is proper behaviour), but I think in the case where someone edits a deleted answer, there's no point bumping the question for content that most people aren't going to see (and since the answer is deleted, shouldn't be seen anyway).

EDIT: A nifty way to abuse the system (10k+ only!).

Answer 1

EDIT: A nifty way to abuse the system (10k+ only!).

Well, yeah. But easily detected by other 10k users and mods (the last activity shows your name and the link goes straight to the deleted answer) - if you pulled that trick too often on the same post, you'd probably find yourself called to account.

Answer 2

Whenever I want to explain why I delete my post I put a comment in instead of editing the question. Not sure if the bump you're talking about is intentional, but this is at least a workaround.

Answer 3

Okay, now that I have 10k, I understand this seemingly erroneous behaviour a lot more.

• Undeleting an answer doesn't bump the question (unlike what I said/assumed in the question) because this would be too easy to abuse with little history trace (you can still see it in the post revisions, but that's harder to access if there was no edit)

• Edits are more important to peer-review than deletes and undeletes (and, unlike delete/undelete, are possible to undo when you don't own the post)

• Using the same basic logic as normal posts keeps the system simpler

I think the idea is that if you're going to undelete an answer, it's highly likely that it will be edited during that process, which is generally sufficient to draw attention to the changes.

I think the use case I presented in the question was flawed, because there doesn't need to be a reason for me to delete an answer -- it's my post to delete as I choose. @squillman provides a good workaround for giving a deletion reason.