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If a moderator deletes a post, but forgets to lock it, then the owner can simply undelete it.

Shouldn't posts that are deleted by a moderator be locked by default?

(A spam answer on Super User was deleted by a moderator, but undeleted by its fake author a day later. After that, it eventually was flagged again and got deleted and locked by Community. But I don't know if this is rare?)

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2 Answers 2

up vote 11 down vote accepted

This is a great idea.

While we're not going to explicitly "lock" the post, we are going to disallow non-moderators from undeleting a post that was deleted by a mod.

This change will be pushed tonight.

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Can I suggest not allowing the poster to undelete it, but still allowing users to vote to undelete it? I can't actually think of a case where a mod might delete a post and then the community might want to bring it back, but this avoids the OP-undelete loophole in a less intrusive way –  Michael Mrozek Apr 7 '11 at 20:37
Something you probably thought about, but: what if the moderator who deleted no longer is a moderator after some time? (Well, even if the author could then undelete, that is probably no issue at all, as some time will have passed.) –  Arjan Apr 7 '11 at 20:42
I sure hope that the community will still be able to undelete by votes those posts. –  Lance Roberts Apr 7 '11 at 20:56
Does this change also apply to questions, Jarrod? And deleting answers by 20k was introduced February 2011, after I posted my question. Does the 20k privilege also include voting to undelete answers? And then even for answers deleted by the author? (Good point, @Lance.) –  Arjan Apr 7 '11 at 21:35
@Michael: if a mod does the delete, it's binding; the community won't be able to vote to undelete. However, users can still flag the deleted post for moderator attention, allowing other mods to review the decision. –  Jarrod Dixon Apr 7 '11 at 23:07
@Arjan: we check the mod election table to see if the deletion happened during the mod's reign of terror, er tenure :) Also, both question and answer post types are affected. –  Jarrod Dixon Apr 7 '11 at 23:11
Concerning my comment above, I have no idea what I was talking about. The code has never supported checking if a user was a moderator at the time of deletion, only at the time of undeletion. I apologize for the misinformation (perhaps I was going to add that check? I can't remember). –  Jarrod Dixon Apr 3 '13 at 20:18
However, I don't know how useful a "was the user a moderator at deletion time" check, or even this "pseudo-lock" check, is anymore, since a user cannot undelete their post by themselves if anyone else participated in the deletion. That would most definitely prevent the case sited in the original question. –  Jarrod Dixon Apr 3 '13 at 20:27

Posts deleted by Community as a result of getting enough spam flags will be locked.

Posts deleted by a moderator are in the same state as if 3 10K+ users had voted to delete. In that case the OP can undelete with a single click too.

If it's spam perhaps moderators need to remember to flag it as spam rather than just deleting. As moderator votes are instantaneous this is the same as if 6 ordinary users had flagged as spam so the Community user steps in and deletes and locks the post.

I haven't checked whether the user gets a 100 point spam hit as well as I've only ever done it for 1 point unregistered users.

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Aha, there's a 3 times weight, nice! Does that nowadays also apply to close votes for duplicates and the like? (I've seen related declined feature requests for that.) –  Arjan Jan 30 '11 at 12:55
@Arjan - all moderator votes are binding and instantaneous and override all other votes. So if 4 users have voted to close as "off topic" and a moderator picked "too localised" then the post will appear closed as "too localised". –  ChrisF Jan 30 '11 at 12:57

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