It's not like they'll be getting into legal trouble over it...

December 19, 2012 10:09 AM

From the FAQ: "Do not post a question to AskMetafilter assuming you can have it removed once it has been answered. This is unfair to the people who answered the question and diminishes the usefulness of the site. " Yet the poor soul who wasn't getting the answers they wanted was able to delete ">their question without a problem? What gives?
posted by Grither to Etiquette/Policy at 10:09 AM (15 comments total)

Looks like the link disappeared: http://ask.metafilter.com/231461/
posted by Grither at 10:10 AM on December 19, 2012

You know what they say about "assume"... this person didn't
posted by MangyCarface at 10:12 AM on December 19, 2012

People occasionally make mistakes. We don't like to remove questions and we're fairly hardline with people who ask for us to do this. We'll do it once. We tell people not to ask us to do it again. We give them a few sentence lecture about how this is not a coll thing to be doing. We try to suggest anonymizing the question instead of actually deleting it. We point out that people can still link to deleted questions, as you have done, which does not actually solve the problem they may want to solve. But, we're not jerks. We'd rather a few dozen people got their answers deleted than one user felt like we were arbitrarily being assholes about a question they had second thoughts about. So we're with you, we don't like it.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:13 AM on December 19, 2012 [8 favorites]

I don't know, but what if we assume it was done by the mods in good faith on the basis of information not available to us, and that this deletion has nothing to do with you, or I, or anyone who might read the FAQ, assuming before posting that we can have a question removed after the fact just on our own say-so? What would that world be like?
posted by gauche at 10:14 AM on December 19, 2012 [6 favorites]

Perhaps that link was removed because it disclosed someone else's private medical information?
posted by Sidhedevil at 10:15 AM on December 19, 2012 [1 favorite]

Guy expressed unexpected regret about sharing something so personal on the site and asked nicely if he could have it removed. We said yes. This happens occasionally. There was zero indication from him that he (a) wanted it gone only specifically because of the answers or (b) posted it with the expectation of later deleting it.

We don't like removing stuff any more than we have to and will take serious objection to someone seemingly intentionally using the site as a temporary ask-and-then-wipe tool, but we're willing to be flexible in one-off poster regret situations.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:15 AM on December 19, 2012 [3 favorites]

Presumably you read that question. Based on its context, I have no objection to the deletion and I'm not even really surprised that the poster requested it. I might agree with you in a more general sense but to the extent that you're objecting to this particular deletion, no way.
posted by cribcage at 10:22 AM on December 19, 2012 [2 favorites]

It's such a deeply personal question; there really shouldn't be any complaints that it was deleted.
posted by Burhanistan at 10:22 AM on December 19, 2012 [5 favorites]

I think the key in that is "once it has been answered" -- that is, don't assume that you get the benefit of AskMeFi's collective wisdom without leaving it up there. That's different from realizing you made a mistake in asking at all.

Or, what cortex said.
posted by Etrigan at 10:22 AM on December 19, 2012

Kinda fucked to dreg this up in metatalk instead of just asking a mod. Seems pretty obvious why it was deleted.
posted by to sir with millipedes at 10:28 AM on December 19, 2012 [25 favorites]

Given that this question has been asked and answered, and given that the point of deleting the AskMe question was to not draw attention to it... Maybe we should close this one up soon, too? Just my opinion.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 10:37 AM on December 19, 2012 [5 favorites]

Yeah, I'm not sure what the point of this post was. It seems more like a chance to point to the question and complain about the asker than it is about policy.
posted by OmieWise at 10:48 AM on December 19, 2012 [2 favorites]

Who needs a fucking line anyway? What do you do with the lines once you know what they are, Grither? Walk 'em? That's bold. Snort 'em? That's cold. Toe 'em? OK, this is getting old.
posted by carsonb at 10:49 AM on December 19, 2012 [2 favorites]

Did it seem odd to anyone else that people were judging the OP for, uh, judging? Alternatively, if you encourage your partner to confess something, and you're an asshole if that something makes you want to break up, does that include murder and pedophilia or does that strictly apply to fucking around? Look, I think there was some good information in the comments and I hope the OP got some benefit, but that did not look to me like ask mefi's finest hour. I am at work and have no more time to discuss it, so if I'm the only one that's thinking along these lines by all means close it up.
posted by in278s at 10:49 AM on December 19, 2012 [4 favorites]

Maybe we should close this one up soon, too? Just my opinion.

I think in this case that makes a lot of sense, yeah; it doesn't seem there's much to specifically discuss here. If anyone needs more specific clarification on deletion policy that the FAQ doesn't cover and can't find answers searching the Metatalk archives, feel free to hit us up at the contact form.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:50 AM on December 19, 2012