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I've noticed a couple of times in recent days that questions from new contributors have been deleted automatically by 'Community' for no clear reason.

For example; this one isn't a great question but it's not obviously offensive or spam (which usually get explicitly quoted as a deletion reason anyway). It was also deleted with only half a dozen views so didn't appear to have had time to receive multiple user flags.

It's possible that the user deleted their own account (in this case) but I've noticed other similar examples recently. Are there new rules for asking questions on this site or is this just a case of coincidence?

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H.SE has a resident Nazi troll. Moderators are destroying his accounts on sight, which causes Community to clean up their posts as a side effect.

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  • BTW: I know that some specifics about this are supposed to be kept under wraps. But are there any available statistics about that or some more portions you (mods) could disclose about this? Not the evaluated attributes, procedure and its details, but eg how often this happens, (is it really a resident?) etc… (I want to complement my own heuristics for judging such posts to not waste that much time on them in the future)
    – LаngLаngС
    Commented Feb 28, 2019 at 11:27
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For those of you like KillingTime who have enough rep to look at deleted questions, the fact that the user in question has no link to their account information is a big clue here. When a user account is destroyed, all posts they have created will get deleted by the community user. Most likely that's what happened here.

Its quite possible what got that user destroyed had nothing to do with the deleted post you are looking at. It could be another highly problematic post, or this could have been a new account that was recognizably from a known persistent (usually Nazi) troll that is being destroyed preemptively.

If a user wants (or for some reason need) their account deleted, but they have posts that are valuable to the site, there are ways to save those. But, as you point out, this isn't exactly one of those so ... meh. It can stay gone.

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    Note that often when a Nazi account is destroyed, there is completely coincidentally a picture posted in our Time Machine chat by a moderator showing a Nazi being punched. We here at H.SE don't as a rule like to discuss user disciplinary action in public, so of course these two things are unrelated, and it is just a really weird coincidence.
    – T.E.D. Mod
    Commented Jan 11, 2019 at 19:57
  • Ha ha! I always wondered what those were about. Cool!
    – Pieter Geerkens
    Commented Jan 12, 2019 at 20:47

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