this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2026
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I'm getting annoyed with people that ask a question, have the community answer their question and troubleshoot over several days, only to delete their post and the solution.

The person asking the question is often providing the least amount of effort, so why should they have exclusive right to delete the contributions of others?

Possible fix: have a per-community option to only request deletion.

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[โ€“] ptz@dubvee.org 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

It's annoying AF, agreed, but there's no provision in the API to do anything about it. That's just how the platform is designed to operate.

The only things we can do about it are:

  1. Notice who does that frequently and refuse to interact with them (block them, tag them, remember their username, whatever works). If mods notice this, it would be nice if they'd ban those users from the community because what they do IS disruptive to the community.
  2. Optionally, don't interact with accounts younger than a week in the "ask" communities because those are known to self destruct.

If a user deletes their account or nukes the post, even admins can't restore it as it just says "Permanently deleted"

Instead of blocking them I wonder if archiving their posts and reposting their questions with the archived comment section would be better. I'm personally less interested in punishing an individual user who's using this space selfishly (as much as they might deserve it) than I am in making this space more useful for everyone, and I don't know how either of these proposals would do that in the short term (arguably they might in the long term by changing user behavior, but that seems like it really would take a long while).