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The question is in the title of this question, Why can't you delete a question with answers.

I tried to delete a question that has answers to it.

My honest thoughts on this is, if I am to get penalized for a question that is not considered good by the community, why should any one else be able to get rep off that question. If I ask it , I should be able to delete it.

So why is the system rigged towards answers?

5

It's so that users who want to leave the site for one reason or another can't take other people's contributions with them by simply deleting all of their questions. It's effectively a form of vandalism protection.

In asking a question, you are (most of the time) adding value to the site, but the real value comes in the form of the answers to that question. Being as deleting a question would also (naturally) mean deleting the valuable answers, questions with answers cannot be deleted so that the answers are preserved.

  • Why, it is a duplicate question, with duplicate answer. Obviously the site considered not needed. So why not delete it? – KyloRen Oct 28 '16 at 11:53
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    @KyloRen If I remember correctly, duplicates are kept around so that someone else wanting to ask the question as a higher chance of finding out that the question would be a duplicate before they ask it. – Dr R Dizzle Oct 28 '16 at 11:55
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    If dups are to be downvoted , then I don't want my questions to stay. – KyloRen Oct 28 '16 at 11:56
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    @KyloRen Then, as Au101 said on the question in question, you'll have to ask a mod to have the question disassociated from your account. – Dr R Dizzle Oct 28 '16 at 11:58
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    @KyloRen There might be made an argument for a negatively-voted question not necessarily contributing anything to the site and thus being viable for deletion (maybe even after merging the answers over to the duplicate target). But whatever you decide to do, repeatedly vandalizing your post into nonsense is not the way to go. So there's that. – TARS Oct 28 '16 at 11:58
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    I'd also suggest for anybody else to step away from this, since KyloRen won't stop rolling it back anyway and as soon as the moderators see it, they'll take care of the post (be that by locking, merging, deleting or whatevering). – TARS Oct 28 '16 at 12:01
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    Dupes are not inherently or automatically downvoted. 2000 out of the existing 2157 dupes have a score of zero or higher. – phantom42 Oct 28 '16 at 12:02
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    I'm not sure the question even was downvoted that much to begin with, but if anything, being a duplicate is less likely to net you downvotes than being a vandalized nonsense post. – TARS Oct 28 '16 at 12:06
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    @Valorum - All I’m saying is that the Be Nice policy applies to all of us, whether we have 2 rep or 40,000. We need to criticize, yes: but constructively. Telling people that they should feel bad for asking bad questions is a mite too far, I think. (Also, those toad slime questions are by a whole bunch of people, and a lot of them are upvoted). – Adamant Oct 28 '16 at 22:47

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