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There should be a provision for deleting old questions. When trying to delete some questions this error message shows up.

Sorry, this question cannot be deleted: too many existing answers, or upvoted/accepted answers

Isn't there any way to delete these questions?

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4 Answers 4

Mail team@stackoverflow.com with your reasons. Basically this will need to be handled on a case-by-case basis with human judgement.

The idea is that just because you don't find value in your question any more doesn't mean that it doesn't provide value to other users. If there are upvoted answers, that means that people have found those answers useful - so it would be a shame to remove that useful information from the site.

However, I'm sure this wouldn't stop a moderator from deleting a question where there's a really good reason why it should be deleted anyway. Or the moderator may have other suggestions as to how the value can be preserved while addressing whatever your concern is. For example, if you accidentally included your password in an edit, a moderator (or at least Jeff :) may be able to directly remove that edit or blank out the password.

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Why the the need for human judgement? If the author of a question wants to retract it, why not allow it? If the question is that valuable, someone else can re-ask it. –  Henk Holterman Sep 23 '09 at 21:39
But what if it's not the question that's providing value, but the many answers which people have spent a lot of time over? By deleting the question, you delete the answers too. –  Jon Skeet Sep 24 '09 at 5:30
Just a reminder; while the human may judge the whole thread to be too useful to delete, you can still ask for it to be unlinked from your account so that your name doesn't show underneath it. –  romkyns Jun 24 '13 at 17:43

Actually, in situations like this, I think people should be able to disown their questions. This way they're effectively deleted from the point of view of the poster, but the question is still in the system for those that spent time to contribute good answers (and got upvotes/accepted).

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The community is not just about you. Once you make a post, you have added your question or answer into the vast knowledge bank that is StackOverflow (or one of it's sister sites) this information is supposed to stick around so that the same questions don't have to get posted every week and people can answer their own questions by seeing what came before.

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When you have 10k rep, then you will be able to vote to delete questions. It takes a minimum of three, up to a maximum of ten votes to delete a question, with the scale being determined by how many votes are on it.

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