This user seems to be making edits to his own questions and saying that he's flagging them for deletion (not sure about the flagging part though since I don't have enough rep for that, but that's according to his newly edited questions. However according to his reputation - 10 currently - he shouldn't even have flagging privileges yet).

I stumbled upon one of his questions in the close queue, it had an accepted answer so I reverted the question back one step, and having seen that he's done the same thing to multiple questions I'm not sure about how this should be handled. I am not sure about if he has access to the delete button on his own questions or not.

As I'm not sure how to handle this I wanted to bring it to the community's attention and ask for support for how to handle future cases like this. Should all questions be reverted back? Should they be closed (possibly with the motivation "user seems to want this question gone")?

  • I tried to rollback the changes. But I couldn't – juergen d Oct 15 '13 at 14:48
  • Seeing that all but one of his questions now has been rollbacked I can guess the answer, but then the question remains Why that's the answer. – Simon Forsberg Oct 15 '13 at 14:51
  • Probably because they posted sensitive details, and wanted them removed. There are, however, better ways to do that of course. – J. Steen Oct 15 '13 at 14:53
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    "I am not sure about if he has access to the delete button on his own questions or not." Anybody can delete their own question so long as the question has no positive-scoring and/or accepted answers. In fact, the edits triggered a possible vandalism flag that was then automatically dismissed by them deleting their own question, which I think shouldn't happen at all so I'll report it separately. – BoltClock's a Unicorn Oct 15 '13 at 14:54
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    Never mind, there already exists a post on that: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/182205/… – BoltClock's a Unicorn Oct 15 '13 at 14:55
  • Looks like he did it with all of his posts that were put on hold. So vanity could be a reason, probably similar to what has also been seen before. – user213634 Oct 15 '13 at 15:01
  • @juergen d: Why not? – BoltClock's a Unicorn Oct 15 '13 at 15:03
  • @BoltClock'saUnicorn: I don't know. I clicked "rocllback", but nothing happened. – juergen d Oct 15 '13 at 15:04
  • @AndersUP I think this has happened with someone who was q-banned and thought deleting would allow them to ask again. – psubsee2003 Oct 15 '13 at 15:17
  • @AndersUP The first question I intercepted only has one close vote. – Simon Forsberg Oct 15 '13 at 15:33
  • @psubsee2003 Yeah, possibly. Would be classic. And Simon: That was the one I hadn't checked myself; presumably I only checked those that were already on hold. I wonder why he would do that. – user213634 Oct 15 '13 at 21:38

Users most certainly should not be editing their questions to remove all of the content and just say they want the post deleted.

Users can only delete their posts if there are no upvoted/accepted answers. If that's the case for the question you could just tell the user to hit the delete button through a comment, unless you'd really like to see that question kept around.

You can revert the edits, as they are inappropriate, and optionally comment saying that it's not appropriate for users to vandalize their own posts like that. If the user makes the edit again then don't get into an edit war; just flag the post and let a mod handle it. They can restore the question and then lock the post, preventing further edits for a period of time.

Questions should not be closed just because the user wants them gone. If the community feels that the question is valuable it doesn't matter if the author wants them kept around or not; we feel that they're valuable, so we'll keep them around. The most that they could do would be to disassociate their account from the question. If they wanted to do that they would need to flag the post for moderator attention. (In this particular case the user did this with all of his already closed questions though, so it's not really relevant to this case.)

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