Did we really have to delete this 80-vote community wiki answer after three years?

The question should not have been deleted. Say it with me:

We do not delete good content. We do not delete good content.

There are bad answers on that question (no doubt!) and the question itself is off topic, but that doesn't mean it should be deleted.

If it had no good content? Sure. Delete it.

The appropriate action would have been to flag the question for moderator attention requesting a wiki-lock and cleanup of the answers after.

A historical lock is also a bad idea because the question has a lot of views, good content, and has already shown that the community is willing to update it.

How to handle Off Topic Closed Questions

If you see upvoted content that is useful, don't delete.

If there are a high number of votes or views and there is something to learn; don't delete it.

If you really, really, really, feel like it should be deleted, engage on Meta.

If there's any doubt that something is useful to people; don't delete it. Bring it up on meta. That's what Meta is for.

I'm one of the ten deleters of this question. One of the things you should keep in mind when an 80-vote question is deleted is that it takes about ten of us to do so. That's ten people who decided they never want to see this question again, not just the usual three.

And, that's ten of us with fairly high rep on the site. We're not new to this. Our opinions should carry some weight.

I felt this question was crap and the answers were disorganized. If you want to curate this question, you should consider the following thought experiment: given how the question and answers have turned out so far, create a better quality question on the same topic. Create better quality answers to that question. The questions and answers need not be on-topic for Stack Overflow today, but they should still be in the correct format for Stack Overflow.

They should not be the rambling blog post that this question and answers turned into.

If you can't create something of high quality out of the question and answers, then copy them all to your blog and let our normal processes delete the question.

I am very disappointed that any moderator would override the opinions of ten high-rep users who all thought the question should be deleted. We obviously didn't think that a discussion on meta was necessary before deleting. If the moderator thought such a discussion was necessary, then the ten of us should have been directed to that discussion on meta, and only after a consensus was reached should our ten votes be overridden by the moderator.

It should not take 30 answers to answer this one bad question!!!

As a non-mod, the tools that a user has to do moderation are:

• Down vote
• Close vote
• Delete vote
• Flag

Flags are perceived by many users as slow and hit or miss for effecting the desired outcome (one only has to look in meta to see people asking why flags are being declined). This is especially the case with custom flags.

The other big tool that 10k users have is the delete vote. Most of the time the delete vote is used ([citation needed] though it would take SE digging to back me up or discredit me) it is used posts that are three delete votes and its gone.

Its really easy to find things needing one delete vote - go look at this query

As of this writing, you can look at this or this for something with one delete vote left on the question.

Here's the thing... some of the answers there are crap, and the question attracts crap answers apparently. As the answers are upvoted, a 20k can't delete vote those answers away (and mods won't delete them either). So, do you delete vote the question that attracts those answers to get rid of them or not?

The ideal case is for mods to actively work on helping the community clean up questions by deleting the poor quality answers so that the remaining answer can be a good candidate for historical locking or wiki lock.

The trend you will see when looking at the questions returned by that query is they are old "best XYZ" questions. This really doesn't fit SO's mission and style of Q&A. I personally feel that preserving these questions and answers, however popular and 'useful' ultimately hurts the quality of the site.

We all know how many people read the help center before asking questions. And we should expect a similar portion to read the "don't ask questions like this" on locked questions. But yet these questions exist with hundreds of upvotes representing thousands of reputation points - something we are trained to want to have on Stack Overflow.

So to SE - if these posts belong on stack overflow, give trusted users additional tools to remove the crap answers that are somehow popular as part of the community moderation tools. You know mods are going to decline the flags and so the only tools we have is the delete vote.

So to mods - if you think these are posts with value, act on them now - without flags. Clean up the questions, remove the poor one liner answers that are somehow at +10 score and wiki lock them. Note though that the community isn't maintaining the posts and putting a wiki lock or historical lock on them can send the wrong message to new users (after all, why not start out with a wiki lock question now?). While you may consider yourselves exception handlers only, you are also the ultimate arbitrators of quality on the site - the low bar that you say is "good enough" is going to remain as the low bar for all new posts. The one liner that "addresses the question" will be posted again and again and again by countless users having that be the median quality of an answer. The only tools the 10 and 20ks have to rectify this is deleting the questions that attract such answers wholesale.

Consider trying to work with the toolsmith types to be able to lift the content of these posts into another place (tag wikis? sub pages on tag wikis maybe? blog posts? migration to SoftwareRecs?) so that the content can be preserved, but in a format that is more appropriate than as a Q&A that is really a poll for recommendations.

That question is definitively not on-topic under current StackOverflow guidelines, which leaves three options, either:

1. Delete it;
2. Apply a historical lock; or
3. Apply a collaborative effort lock (or "wiki lock").

Note that the historical lock will prevent future edits to the answer, which will then become out of date (which is why these questions aren't good for SO in the first place!) As this MetaSE question puts it, posts may not be suitable for historical lock if they "Are being actively maintained".

The collaborative effort lock is for:

questions that are not exactly appropriate for Stack Overflow, are popular and have useful answers where the primary value arises from the community's regular efforts to keep them updated via edits.

which could potentially fit this question.

I'm now considering moving all my significant SO contributions out on my website

If it does end up deleted, I think that it would be good to continue to host the content of that answer somewhere more appropriate for it (assuming by "moving" you mean "copying").

That question is definitively not on-topic under current Stack Overflow guidelines.

Given that this question is highly popular and upvoted and has a really stellar answer I would only close it here, not delete it.

In general: Questions about tools, libraries... tend to be outdated really fast. That's why they are off-topic on SO. While many people like a comparison of frameworks from an expert, the content will ultimately get outdated. A Q&A does not work very well there. The use to visitors is then typically very limited.

However Software Recommendations tries to deal with it and I recommend to leave these things with them. Questions of these type should at least be closed here and for the future rather live on Software Recommendations. Note however that this particular question is too open-ended for Software Recommendations: questions on Software Recommendations must describe a specific purpose as well as enumerate essential requirements. See the interesting disccusions about Is it okay to ask for alternatives? on their meta.