8

I'm not positive I understood this discussion, but Jeff's answer makes it sound like a question with 2+ answers requires three votes to undelete -- the owner can't undelete with a single vote. I don't quite understand the motivation behind the 2+ answer part, so I might be reading it wrong.

Robert's answer was more explicit:

To answer your question, a user cannot (and should not be able to) undo a democratic, voted action. When it takes three users to vote-to-delete a question, it should take three users to vote-to-un-delete a question. The original author should not have any more power than the one-man-one-vote in this case.

If that's still the case, there appears to be a bug. This question was deleted back in March by three delete votes, and then undeleted yesterday by the owner's single undelete vote. The question already had hundreds of answers at that point

2
  • 2
    That question should be re-deleted.
    – devinb
    Aug 12, 2010 at 18:17
  • 1
    Thanks for pointing out that question so I could throw a close vote at it. I don't think it needs deletion (and with new requirements probably won't be) but it should definitely be closed. Aug 12, 2010 at 18:22

3 Answers 3

5

Jeff's answer that you're linking to has been deleted, maybe because it was misleading.

The issue has been fixed on 6 September 2011. Citing Jarrod Dixon:

This has been changed.

If a post was deleted by users other than its owner, the owner's undelete vote will no longer instantly undelete - it will be counted just like other users' votes to undelete.

Note that if a moderator participated in the deletion, only another moderator can undelete.

3

Allowing the user to undelete a community-deleted question breaks the consistency of the "punishments" on the site.

Clearly the user wants it to exist, this is why they created it in the first place. After that, 5 users voted to close, which is implicitly a preparation for deletion. Then users had to actually vote to delete it.

The community (actually a subset of it) got together and agreed that this is not appropriate.

It is therefore unfair to the community to have it undeleted by the user who caused the problem.

It is inconsistent with the other negative effects.

A downvote on your own post, cannot be undone.
If my post is closed, I cannot unclose.
If I am banned, I cannot unban myself.
But if my post is deleted, I am able to undelete it?

Why should deletion be different from all other negative reinforcement actions?

-5

I don't see this as a bug, even though there are answers that don't like this behavior. A user should always be able to undelete his question. If the question shouldn't be undeleted then a moderator can lock it, and that disables the undelete button.

Note that when a question is deleted with flags it is automatically locked out from being undeleted.

5
  • 7
    (-1) Users should not be able to delete community deleted questions. Basically, it is already assumed that the user thinks the question is appropriate, or else they would not have posted in the first place. Users should be able to undelete self-deleted question, thereby undoing their own action.
    – devinb
    Aug 12, 2010 at 18:23
  • 2
    I can't unban myself, or unclose a closed question, or undo someone's downvote on my post, why should I be able to undelete?
    – devinb
    Aug 12, 2010 at 18:24
  • 1
    Or to put it another way, questions skew toward undeleted... They don't need help - especially under the new system.
    – Shog9
    Aug 12, 2010 at 18:28
  • folks probably don't need any more motivation to flag-delete stuff they don't like
    – Shog9
    Aug 12, 2010 at 18:55
  • @Shog9, yeh I hate it when people flag innapropriately just because they want to harm the poster or delete the post; but I wanted to have a more complete answer. Aug 12, 2010 at 18:56

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