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  • 66
    You employees are getting a whole lot more verbose. Are you paid by the word now?
    – random
    Commented Mar 25, 2013 at 22:38
  • 7
    Whatever the reason, it's certainly not subconscious desire to put readers to sleep before they get to the punchline. I guarantee it.
    – Shog9
    Commented Mar 25, 2013 at 22:39
  • 27
    Closed should not be just about creating a path for deletion.
    – Lance Roberts
    Commented Mar 25, 2013 at 23:10
  • 27
    @LanceRoberts: It isn't, but there's really no point in keeping questions around that have no hope of rehabilitation.
    – user102937
    Commented Mar 25, 2013 at 23:12
  • 6
    Unless you're going to improve every single question that gets closed, then that's not entirely true @LanceRoberts Either way, they're not advocating deleting good content, so I don't see what your issue with the proposal is
    – Ivo Flipse
    Commented Mar 25, 2013 at 23:15
  • 1
    I agree that there are plenty of closed questions that could be deleted, but it's a subset, not the whole.
    – Lance Roberts
    Commented Mar 25, 2013 at 23:20
  • 2
    For example, a question was deleted today that had a good Eric Lippert answer, gone forever now.
    – Lance Roberts
    Commented Mar 25, 2013 at 23:21
  • 2
    So long as the roomba doesn't achieve self-awareness...
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Mar 25, 2013 at 23:25
  • 6
    @mmeyers, I'm only 9k on SO, so I can't see it yet. Robert is right that is wasn't legendary, but I thought it was good, so no reason to delete the question which I had flagged to change to a 'too localized' close reason from NARQ. Makes me not want to flag for close reason changes again.
    – Lance Roberts
    Commented Mar 25, 2013 at 23:35
  • 2
    Does your graph use the DatePosted or the DateClosed/DateDeleted? If its the first, it may be skewed a bit because older posts have had a much longer period of time to accumulate delete votes. I noticed this discrepancy when I was writing queries to look at Close trends for Programmers.SE, and the two graphs look quite a bit different.
    – Rachel
    Commented Mar 26, 2013 at 14:44
  • 2
    It's creation date, @Rachel - that said, you'll notice that I cut it off about three months ago; as you say, the skew is pretty noticeable otherwise: once you hit mid-February, you start to see the effect of the existing automatic deletion: i.sstatic.net/OsQOy.png
    – Shog9
    Commented Mar 26, 2013 at 16:15
  • 2
    If you do allow users to view deleted questions if they have the link, will you be leaving comments from deleted posts in their Inbox or on the Responses tab in their profile? I know there have been times when I open/close my inbox without clicking on a message (usually because I clicked on a different notification, or clicked too fast and closed it by accident), and then when I open it again the comment on the deleted post is gone
    – Rachel
    Commented Mar 28, 2013 at 15:49
  • 3
    Wait, about the "closed and abandoned" part - doesn't closing a question force it to become de facto abadoned? It's awfully hard to have your question become de-abandoned if there's no way for anyone to answer it. :/
    – JamesTheAwesomeDude
    Commented Apr 26, 2013 at 6:07
  • 1
    +1: Bravo! And I definitely welcome the day when you implement "Improved oversight for deletion." I've definitely seen people abuse their delete vote privileges.
    – Jim G.
    Commented Apr 27, 2013 at 19:31
  • 2
    @James: you can still edit closed questions and vote on them (including voting to re-open). But yeah, a good many closed questions are abandoned.
    – Shog9
    Commented Apr 27, 2013 at 19:35