I'm not a big fan of automatic deletions because there's no oversight, and no warning to the user that their post went missing.

But if you did increase the automatic deletion window to items older than 7 days instead of 30, I'd like to see the posts be:

• closed
• as something other than duplicate
• over 7 days ago so the user has time to see the closure reason
• no answers
• something answered is much more likely to have the OP coming back to the post to re-read the answer
• the answer may come looking for their answer so they can copy parts of it into another answer (I do this all the time)
• score <= 0
• if a post got rep, users are likely to come looking for their missing rep when the post gets deleted
• no reopen votes in the past 14 or 30 days
• if someone made an attempt to reopen something, it was probably valuable to them in some way, so give the post a larger window of to stay visible before deleting it
• no activity for at least a week
• no one is trying to fix or reopen the post

The whole point of automatic deletions is to reduce the moderator workload, and it wouldn't make sense to have the process trigger a lot of "Where did my question/reputation/answer go" posts appearing on meta as a result of the change. You want to be sure you only get rid of posts that are no longer useful to both the community and the OP.

With that said, there are many posts which are not useful to the community and could probably be deleted, but that are useful to the OP (mostly localized posts). If you had some way for the OP to see their deleted posts from either their profile or from some non-publicized url path, then I would be much more in favor of looser automatic deletion requirements.

I've personally had multiple occasions where I've gone to look for an answer I got in the past, only to discover I'm unable to find the post in my profile anywhere because it's been deleted. Sure the question wasn't useful to the community and I could understand the deletion, but the answers that were posted were still very useful to me.

And last of all, on your point of

Restrict quick deletions on anything asked "in good faith"

Here's my problem: not every user sees a post the same way.

• One person's version of "spam" may be another person's version of "answering questions", particularly when someone is trying to publicize their personal blog.

• One person's version of "gibberish" may just be another non-english speaker's version of "trying to get answers"

• One person's version of "rant" is another person's version of "asking a question"

In all cases, deleting content as soon as it's closed does not teach the user anything.

You have a whole army of community users who are happy to help out with site maintenance, however most of the time they are looking at recently active posts, and not older posts that have been closed for a bit.

If you provided this large group of users to say "delete this post in X days unless it gets significantly edited or reopened", then you will have many more users stepping up to help out with site maintenance, thus reducing the moderator workload.

I'm not a big fan of automatic deletions because there's no oversight, and no warning to the user that their post went missing.

But if you did increase the automatic deletion window to items older than 7 days instead of 30, I'd like to see the posts be:

• closed
• as something other than duplicate
• over 7 days ago so the user has time to see the closure reason
• no answers
• something answered is much more likely to have the OP coming back to the post to re-read the answer
• the answerer may come looking for their answer so they can copy parts of it into another answer (I do this all the time)
• no upvotes
• if a post got rep, users are likely to come looking on meta for their missing rep when the post gets deleted, thus increasing moderator workload instead of decreasing it
• no reopen votes in the past 14 or 30 days
• if someone made an attempt to reopen something, it was probably valuable to them in some way, so give the post a larger window of to stay visible before deleting it
• no activity for at least a week
• no one is trying to fix or reopen the post

The whole point of automatic deletions is to reduce the moderator workload, and it wouldn't make sense to have the process trigger a lot of "Where did my question/reputation/answer go" posts appearing on meta as a result of the change. You want to be sure you only get rid of posts that are no longer useful to both the community and the OP.

With that said, there are many posts which are not useful to the community and could probably be deleted, but that are useful to the OP (mostly localized posts). If you had some way for the OP to see their deleted posts from either their profile or from some non-publicized url path, then I would be much more in favor of looser automatic deletion requirements.

I've personally had multiple occasions where I've gone to look for an answer I got in the past, only to discover I'm unable to find the post in my profile anywhere because it's been deleted. Sure the question wasn't useful to the community and I could understand the deletion, but the answers that were posted were still very useful to me.

And last of all, on your point of

Restrict quick deletions on anything asked "in good faith"

Here's my problem with that: not every user sees a post the same way.

• One person's version of "spam" may be another person's version of "answering questions", particularly when someone is trying to publicize their personal blog.

• One person's version of "gibberish" may just be another non-english speaker's version of "trying to get answers"

• One person's version of "rant" is another person's version of "asking a question"

In all cases, deleting content as soon as it's closed does not teach the user anything.

You have a whole army of community users who are happy to help out with site maintenance, however most of the time they are looking at recently active posts, and not older posts that have been closed for a bit.

If you provided this large group of users with a way to say "delete this post in X days unless it gets significantly edited or reopened", then you will have many more users stepping up to help out with site maintenance, thus reducing the moderator workload.