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This specific question is in the curious position of being deleted without being closed. It used to be closed as a dupe, but this was disputed in the comments:

Is this really a duplicate? The question linked is about a private, one-on-one conversation. This one is about groups and I imagine it would need to be handled very differently. https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com/posts/comments/31611

Afterwards it was placed in the reopen queue, after which it gained another reopen vote.

Three days later, within the same minute, the question was both deleted and reopened. This seems counterproductive.

Why are we deleting questions that have an ongoing dispute about whether or not it should even be closed? I can't see exactly when every single vote was cast, but since both were deleted and reopened in the same minute, I guess that at some point it would have been sitting on 2 delete and 4 reopen votes.

Should we be deleting questions that still have active reopen votes?

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  • Actually, no. But I did delete and then reopen it, for science! And brought it up in chat just in case somebody wanted to look into it further.
    – NVZ
    Commented Dec 19, 2017 at 14:40
  • I really wish that specific question would have been reopened. I was one of the ones who cast the 'close' vote because it appeared so similar to the dupe post linked. However, I updated the title to not be almost identical to the other post in hope of bringing attention to the difference in answers it would be receiving but alas, nothing. The question really can't be properly answered by answers on the one it was flagged as a duplicate of.
    – Jess K.
    Commented Dec 19, 2017 at 14:50
  • I thought the official SE policy for questions closed as dupes was to leave undeleted, as a way to find the dupe (except for intentional copy-paste duplicates). So was this one manually closed for some other reason than the close reason?
    – 1006a
    Commented Dec 20, 2017 at 18:09

1 Answer 1

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I am, in general, slightly uncomfortable with the idea of deleting any question that has a significant (for some value of "significant") number of reopen votes on it. This is for two reasons:

  • The set of users who can see deleted posts is much smaller than the set of users who can cast close/reopen votes.
  • Deleted posts are not easy to find unless you go looking for them - and I doubt many people regularly do that.

The point is, once a post is deleted, the odds of it getting either undeleted or reopened are slim to none (From a technical perspective, deletions can't really get reviewed). In other words, a small set of users (three) have the ability to effectively stop certain posts from getting reopened - and I know that on at least one occasion, that's been a motivation. I do not in the slightest bit support this.

There are several cases where I wholeheartedly, full-steam-ahead support manual question deletion:

  • The question is spam or a rant.
  • The question is clearly not asked in good faith.
  • The question is intended as an answer or comment elsewhere.

There are several cases where I do not support manual question deletion:

  • The question's bad (i.e. downvote-bad, if you will) but not crappy-and-should-be-thrown-in-the-incinerator-bad.
  • The question will be deleted quickly by the Roomba, and poses no problem by sticking around.

There are exceptions to every rule, and so I've probably missed something, but these are the main cases that jump to mind.

I can't see anything in this post that justifies deletion. Is it a duplicate? Maybe. Some people think so, and some don't. If it is, then it'll serve as a useful signpost down the road, as another way to direct people to the target question. If it's not, then it should get reopened, and maybe it will get answered.

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