16
If the question is on topic and generally fits the site, it should stay.
A question with a trivial answer can always be put on hold. For example:
This describes a problem that can't be reproduced that seemingly went away on its own or was only relevant to a very specific period of time. It's off-topic as it's unlikely to help future readers.
If this ...
15
This question was well written, upvoted, featured, and had 6 upvotes.
Unfortunately the OP made a mistake to admit they are on Mint in a comment, and to add screenshots with a Mint theme.
Does this justify to edit the question for putting "Linux Mint" into the title, and to tag it with mint?
This edit consequently led to downvotes, and close votes.
It ...
14
Why delete? This question looks fine to me, aside from not being about Ubuntu. It could be migrated to Unix & Linux.
(Why doesn't AU have a migration path to U&L anyway? There are many of decent questions about Ubuntu derivatives.)
14
Logical simple way of viewing it lets us divide this in 2 types of spam:
The post related to the question in case (as in: it could be an answer) but connected to a commercial product/information or owned/developed by the user;
The post is pure spam and has nothing to do with the site or the information we normally deal with;
First case should make us ...
14
I think it's good that the system does this, and I don't think it should be more difficult for questions to be deleted automatically.
I think that what happened in Franck Dernoncourt's case is terrible and I really hope that it gets sorted out quickly. But I think that case is exceptional, and should not be considered a flaw in the system, but rather a case ...
11
If you still want to know the answer to something to a valid question and can maintain the question (keep up with comments/edits), there's no reason to close the question.
In my opinion this isn't a bug report, it's asking for a way to disable xrandr from doing something, and you're perfectly active with it so it's fine.
In terms of going forward:
A ...
10
Let's try to be as objective as possible in the ideology of Mint vs. Ubuntu:
You can install cinnamon in 13.10.
The answerer found that it's actually a gsettings syntax error.
The asker agreed and accepted the answer.
He even awarded a bounty.
Despite being off-topic, everything else that the asker and answerer show there is good citizenship and how the ...
9
Do we all like commercials...
Rhetorical maybe - if you took a straw poll, the answer will almost always be no.
We as a community need to understand that at the end-of-the-day, Stack Exchange is a business - not a charity. What Stack Exchange strives for is to spread the knowledge. It does this - by quite a large margin - through web-search results.
Thus ...
9
Short Answer
In general, it's OK (and sometimes beneficial) for users to delete their own posts and we have this ability, though there are some limitations to self-deletion*. The underlying reason for allowing vote-to-undelete is, as usual, that questions and their answers are not only for the OP but for the entire community of site users / visitors present ...
9
You didn't show your working
Imagine this... Your significant other gets severe abdominal pain. You take them to hospital. Without any discussion, they're immediately whisked away to surgery. No evidence the doctors actually investigated the problem. No explanation of what they think the problem is, or how surgery will fix it. How do you feel? Probably not ...
7
I think the bounty/reputation should be preserved for the answers even after the question is deleted.
There are specific conditions in which rep on deleted posts are preserved:
First, if you’ve contributed something worthwhile to the site, you
should keep the reputation for that even if it eventually gets
deleted. “Worthwhile” here is defined as,
...
7
Closing duplicates also helps the following things:
Maintenance
We don't abandon or "archive" wrong information, we strive to always have that page be the relevant awesome answer for that particular question. In October Ubuntu had to change how we shipped Java.
It took us about 2 hours to update all the Java questions here, because it's centralized into ...
7
When you've been around the site for a while, you'll find that links to questions in Meta tend to garner many more views than normal.
Please do not delete closed questions with many views and many upvotes
When it comes to asking about deleting stuff, it's human nature to say to one's self - "I'm going to exercise my right here" ... even before the ...
7
Honestly, we're not that different. I'm a stubborn old goat at times (as you of all people know) but if I see things going this far, I try to step back and listen to what other people are telling me.
In this particular case it might not be a vote against what you're saying but one against how you're saying it. Personally I took particular issue with the ...
7
I have deleted your question. Done.
6
My opinion only:
Duplicates get closed instead of deleted for several reasons.
seo
adding search terms without modifying the meaning of the original question
having duplicates closed allows a central way to put all the answers in one place
(read as merge)
Here's a specific example where something got closed and merged to put an answer that merited ...
6
You could always flag it and let the 10ks and moderators make the call. But you're already weighing up the right questions. Here's the full spectrum:
Could it still be useful to somebody else? If it's really obscure, we could just nuke it.
Could other people declare technical merit? Couldn't they pick your accepted answer by voting for the right answer?
...
6
I think that this is a good idea on a case by case basis--users with delete votes should use their best judgement in voting to delete when they see a closed question that is such (ie. off topic, localized, poor quality) that it would never be of interest to anyone.
However, I think that a specific campaign to find and delete such closed questions would be a ...
6
Questions that are deleted are not visible to most users, but there are some users who can see deleted posts, including:
The original author of the post
Users with 10,000 or more reputation (see the help center's privileges list for 10k rep)
Elected Moderators (like myself)
StackExchange Employees
This has always been the case. Deleted questions are not ...
5
Sometimes spam edits still occur.
We may need to help users who only recently gained edit privileges to know about this to avoid this.
For addrssing users who are not in chat it may be a good idea to increase people's awareness on this topic by occasionally tagging this post as featured to make it appear in the Community Bulletin.
5
Yes, we should delete off-topic/NARQ after a specified waiting period to give the user a chance for rebuttal.
5
Improve your question.
That thing is just a bunch of scrambled words impossible to understand. Some hero, read your question and provided an answer. Others found that his heroic act should be recompensed and upvoted the answer. You can't ask someone to delete their answer just because it wasn't helpful to you. You should edit your question and provide the ...
5
I'm not an Ask Ubuntu user, but network-wide policy is that only substantial and re-usable Q&A is on-topic at Stack Exchange.
A question that may be entirely answered by pointing out a typo is trivial and is not useful for others. It should be put on hold, and deleted. I would certainly argue against undeletion.
which made me feel less like a human ...
5
If you look at your activity page: https://askubuntu.com/users/511388/konrad-firm?tab=topactivity there is 1 question listed: On KDE how to change taskbar's font size?
5
From what's been written so far, it looks like the way to delete a merged post is to ask a question on meta, and then a tiny dinosaur mod will kindly delete it for you.
However, for the sake of future readers, what's probably the better way to do this is flag the post for moderator attention by clicking the small flag link under the post, like so...
5
I feel you have accepted @Oli's answer but missed its point. So here's my attempt to point out what's wrong with your answer(s) posted to that question in particular.
A disclaimer first, I was the one to cast the first delete vote on your answer (10k+ users only) which you deleted again after it was undeleted. I admit I overlooked the comment by the ...
4
You need to update/improve your questions occasionally with your progress in order to avoid deletion:
Enable automatic deletion of old, unanswered zero-score questions after a year?
Neither one of your questions has been touched in a year!
4
Hmm yes. That question has no particular value to the future visitors. I am deleting it.
4
If you delete a post that is duplicate of an original any information in it will be lost forever.
Ideally all duplicates should be merged in to single one and we should be left without answers in the closed post.
The site has recently enabled something called automatic redirection, that means that if an user arrives at a page via any search engine that is ...
4
On Code Golf Stack Exchange there was recently a flood of code-trolling questions, which were mostly awful. While they brought lots of traffic to the website, they were also awful questions (which were off-topic and too broad). Most of the "follow the leader" code-trolling questions were simply deleted, but some (the better ones, like https://codegolf....
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
