Re:Ask HN: Where does one search development advice these days?
by pc86 on Sunday December 20, 2020 @08:02AM
(#25485944)
It seems odd to allow deleting questions with answers at all, since you're essentially allowing someone to delete someone else's content without their permission. Not quite as odd as "well you should know if we're going to arbitrarily delete this question before you waste time answering it," though.
Re:Ask HN: Where does one search development advice these days?
by fabian2k on Sunday December 20, 2020 @08:15AM
(#25486004)
There is a mechanism to prevent this, any answer with a positive score prevents deletion. There are also valid reasons to remove your own question, the most common is that you discovered a mistake that makes the entire question irrelevant. In that case you don't want a bad answer stopping the cleanup. Deleting good content without a reason is against the rules, it just isn't enforced by technical means in all cases. This is where moderators come into it to handle those cases, but you have to know to flag them for this.
There's two options here on what could have happened:
- the community deleted the question because it did not meet the quality criteria
- the user self-deleted after the answer was posted
To avoid the first case you need to understand roughly which kind of questions get closed and deleted on SO, and simply avoid answering them if you don't want your effort to go to waste. The second case mostly happens with users posting homework (in an effort to remove the evidence), which are cases where answering is somewhat discouraged. But if the question is generally good, you can flag that case for moderator attention and it will likely get undeleted. Once your answer has an upvote, the asker cannot delete anymore.