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Should we try to re-start manual deletions or is the situation fine anyway?

On MO 1.0 we had, after some discussions and conflicts but still, what I think was a quite smoothly and efficiently working process of deleting "bad" content. It seems with the move to MO 2.0 this process of manual deletions came more-or-less to a halt.

Two main reasons for this could be:

  • There is now an auto-deletion script so there is less need to do so(1).

  • The deletion interface changed and makes it easy to overlook existing votes.

Are there any other reasons? Should we try to re-start manual deletions or is the situation fine anyway?

For those that might not know as 10k+ user one can vote to delete closed questions (with 20k+ one can delete certain answers). Lists of recent existing votes are available under "tools"; for example a list of pending votes over the last 30 days [10k+ only]. The list can be considerably expanded clicking the triangle; yet if the list is too long it can get cut-off, choosing a different period of time (14d, 2d, yesterday) sometimes yields different lists.


(1) The precise details of auto-deletion are somewhat involved (see "by the system" in this FAQ How does deleting work? What can cause a post to be deleted, and what does that actually mean? What are the criteria for deletion?). In brief and roughly a question will be deleted after:

  • a week when it has negative score and is closed and "unanswered".

  • a month when it has negative score and no answer.

  • a year when it has zero-score and got little attention (low-views, few comments, and no answer).

What does not get auto-deleted are questions with an answer that has positive score or is accepted. Answers with a high score typically were not deleted. What's left would be badly received questions with accepted and/or low-score answers.

Something that does get auto-deleted are questions hardly anybody took some interest in, even if there is no negative feedback whatsoever. (Only after a year, though.)

user9072