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There was a question about what to do about a co-worker who listened to a loud radio that got closed as a duplicate to What can I do about a very loud coworker?

It caught my attention because I work in an office across from someone who frequently likes to play his music quite loudly, and his music tastes are not always the same as mine.

I was trying to get it reopened because a loud co-worker is not the same as a loud radio (for example, Management can make you shut off a radio, but they can't really "shut off" a loud co-worker"), but it got deleted today.

From the meta-faq post about community delete votes:

Generally we only delete closed, low scoring posts with no answers or poor answers. Closed posts are all "candidates for deletion" but generally only irrecoverably off topic/poor questions without useful information in answers should be deleted.

This question does not seem to fit this criteria, so why was it deleted?

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    Out of cuirousity, why is a support question that is asking why something got deleted getting downvotes? I realize downvotes may be different on meta, however I don't think there's much here to agree/disagree with.
    – Rachel
    Jan 18, 2013 at 21:59
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    I'm going to go with the brain @#%#@ seeing posts within posts gives me trying to read it? :-)
    – enderland
    Jan 18, 2013 at 23:42
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    Why is this question getting downvotes???
    – Jim G.
    Jan 19, 2013 at 0:30
  • @enderland I know, I'm the one that posted the question and it still confuses me trying to read through the post :)
    – Rachel
    Jan 20, 2013 at 23:34
  • @gnat tags should be based on the question, not the answers.
    – Monica Cellio
    Apr 8, 2018 at 17:53
  • @MonicaCellio I believe I added the tag based on the question because it focuses on a post from a self-admitted troll - this is clearly visible in profile of its asker: "I am a constructive troll, meaning... the tone used in my posts sounds unprofessional, childish, trollish, even ridicule...". The fact that one of the answers explicitly points this and that this answer was accepted is nice and helpful for readers but my motivation to add the tag was not based on it
    – gnat
    Apr 10, 2018 at 12:47
  • (...though if you feel it's better to keep this hidden, so be it)
    – gnat
    Apr 10, 2018 at 12:47
  • @gnat it's not a matter of "hidden"; the question here does not mention any of that or a suspicion of trolling. It's like tagging a question on Software Engineering "git" because somebody asked a question about using SVN in some scenario and everybody agreed that the answer is "use git instead".
    – Monica Cellio
    Apr 10, 2018 at 14:11
  • @MonicaCellio as I said I didn't account for the answer here, I only based it on the profile of the asker of discussed question. In that sense your example with git on Software Engineering doesn't feel right, sorry
    – gnat
    Apr 10, 2018 at 14:16
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    @gnat is that information from the profile in the question? I didn't see anything in reading this question to support the tag, but if that's just because info was missing, feel free to edit it in and add the tag back.
    – Monica Cellio
    Apr 10, 2018 at 14:21

3 Answers 3

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The OP posted this question while trolling.

From the OP's own profile:

I am the last guy who is not afraid to say the truth in these forums. I´ll ask politicaly incorrect questions even if they take away my beloved experience points, or health points or magic points, or whatever the points they give you happen to be, i´ll answer unpopular answers if they are true, for i am not here to entertain you but to be the voice of reason in a world of increasing violence and censorship.

If you are like me, unite in this epic quest for truth and rate me up.

United we stand.

I am a constructive troll, meaning that while the tone used in my posts sounds unprofessional, childish, trollish, even ridicule the watchful eye will find deep, delightful and thoughtful truths about tech and society in every line that usually go over most of people´s headses.

Most of time, my typos and constant misuse of grammar and word things is intentional, sometimes is not. Sometimes is plain ignorance, or plaignorance as i like to call it. Most of my material is not fresh or original, but plain plagiarism, plaingiarism as i like to call it, from the good episodes of the simpsons or stuff like that.

The question was there to create problems, was a duplicate of a better question, and had no value in staying on the site to be reopened. So I cast my vote to delete this question along with his 30 other trolls that he posted in under an hour.

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    Thanks Chad :) I'm accepting your answer as it appears to correctly answer my question about why the question was deleted, but I want to also state that I do not agree with deleting an OK question just because a "troll" posted it. We should be judging questions by the question content alone, and the person who posted the question should not have any impact on how you treat it.
    – Rachel
    Jan 22, 2013 at 16:50
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    @Rachel - It was a broken window and needed to be fixed. If the question were decent it would not have been closed in the first place, and I would not have voted to delete it.
    – IDrinkandIKnowThings
    Jan 22, 2013 at 16:54
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From a system perspective, the question was deleted because three regular community users cast delete votes.

EDITED to answer Rachel's question in the comment re: undeleting.

Following the guidance in Delete Votes and You!, specifically in the "What if I think something was wrongly deleted?" section:

If you can vote to delete a post, you can also vote to undelete a post, unless the post was deleted by a moderator or spam flags (it will show a deleted by Community if it's deleted by flags). It takes as many votes to undelete as it does to delete.

Personally -- but I'm only one of three moderators (at least I was at the time this was written :) )-- I would not unilaterally reopen this or anything else that is currently closed by community votes. However, if after a meta discussion about the merits of the question, if three community members with undelete privileges (there are currently ~40 users with this privilege) voted to undelete it, I wouldn't also then delete it again.

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    If there is not a reason for the deletion, do you think it could be undeleted? And ideally reopened, since the question is not a duplicate of the linked question, and the ideal answer is very different between the two? I know it had 4 reopen votes at one point, but it never got a 5th one, even with my flag =/
    – Rachel
    Jan 18, 2013 at 20:40
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    Hi Rachel, I'm afraid I have to agree with deletion on this one. The answers that the question got weren't really all that great, and they were just repeats of the much better answers on the other question. With that said, I really appreciate your desire to try to save questions; your efforts do make a difference. :)
    – jmort253
    Jan 18, 2013 at 20:49
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    @jmort253 The question was only open for a few hours, which is hardly enough time to get a "great" answer, and the mediocre quality of answers that a question has should not determine if the question itself gets closed or deleted. In addition, the questions are definitely not duplicates, so although the answers in the 2nd question may be related, they're not specific to the scenario explained the question the way Jim's answer is.
    – Rachel
    Jan 18, 2013 at 20:56
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    Julie, I appreciate the edit to your answer and that you don't want to unilaterally go against the community's wishes, however I cannot vote to undelete since I can't see the question, and I'm not sure how many users on this site can view deleted questions or will find it. I can't help but wonder if this had something to do with the user that posted the question, because of a comment made in chat. We should be judging questions by their quality, not by the "greatness" of their answers or by the user that posted the question.
    – Rachel
    Jan 18, 2013 at 20:58
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    @Rachel You could make a meta post specifically about undeleting it, which would point people to it who might otherwise not know, and if 3 of the 40 with 2K or more rep see it and agree, there you go!
    – jcmeloni
    Jan 18, 2013 at 21:17
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    @jcmeloni Thanks, I may do that. I wanted to understand why it was deleted in the first place because I didn't want to be trying to undelete a question that had been deleted for a valid reason, such as the OP requesting it to be deleted. I also wanted to know if I was missing something about when I should be voting to delete (I can vote to delete on 2 other SE sites). I am hoping someone can explain here why it was deleted, or better yet, that one of the original 3 that voted to delete would speak up and explain why they voted to delete it.
    – Rachel
    Jan 18, 2013 at 21:21
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    OP did not request to delete it, and the vote-to-delete threshold is 2K (it's the access to moderator tools level, which isn't clear when viewing the privileges page.)
    – jcmeloni
    Jan 18, 2013 at 21:40
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I didn't delete the question, nor did any moderator delete the question, but the answers don't seem to follow the guidelines for a good subjective question as listed in our FAQ. The back it up rule seems to be missing from the answers, and the material in the answers can be found in a much more comprehensive format in the linked duplicate.

I closed the question because, from my perspective, it appeared as if things were going in a direction that wasn't good for the site, and the question was missing some details that would have helped differentiate it further from the linked duplicate. When I closed it, I left the following comment on January 11th:

Hi demonz, welcome to the Workplace Stack Exchange, the Q&A site for questions about navigating the professional workplace. Please check out the duplicate post as there are a lot of outstanding answers there, and we're just repeating the same things in the answers here. If you find that none of those solutions answer your question, please edit this post with what you've tried, why it isn't working, and why the other answers don't help your situation, and we can reopen this post for new answers. Good luck, and welcome! :) – jmort253♦ Jan 11 at 3:44 edit

The post was edited once after that point to add in the clarifications in small font, but other than that, the post has had no other edits since that point and was finally deleted today.

While I can't say exactly why the three users deleted the post, my guess is they didn't see much value in keeping it around, considering it wasn't getting edited and improved. I'm not sure I would have deleted it myself, at least not without waiting a bit longer, but I don't feel there's enough community support to warrant unilaterally undeleting it.

My suggestion is to convince 3 of the 40 undelete voters to undelete the post. Explain why you think the post has value. You might also explain your plan to turn it around through editing as a means of convincing others to help out.

The nice thing about community actions is it takes numbers to get things done, which means there's more distributed energy to invest into turning something so-so into something great. Hope this helps answer your question.

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