I ran into a case today where I felt compelled to restore a question that was deleted by its author. It wasn't that the question itself was remarkable, what was remarkable was the amount of time and effort someone put into answering it. 

Yet it was a bit of a niche question, and there was no voting on the question or the answer, which happened to be the only answer.

This isn't the first time I've done this, and I'm not alone - I believe at least half of our network moderators have encountered this sort of exception and reacted in the same way. 

We currently disallow self-deletion of questions if the question has received multiple answers, or a single upvoted answer. As this is in the interests of people *not* wasting their time writing great answers, should we also block self-deletion if any answer provided has been edited 3 or more times?

We'd then make a much clearer path to our contact form in the UI shown to the user when the system refuses to delete the question, so they don't panic if they posted something that they probably shouldn't have (which might spark more motivation to just edit it out and contact us instead).

What horrible things could this cause that I haven't thought of? Is 3 a great number to start with, because Tesla really liked it, too? Most of all, what do you think?

**Addendum**

So [there is the option](https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/276031/50049) of just disallowing self-deletion once it's clear that *anyone* other than the question author is vested in the question. We need to run some numbers in order to see:

* How many questions with pretty junky terse answers would be left around if we did that
* How much *good* stuff we're throwing away by requiring that the single answer be up-voted in order to block self-deletion

If that turns out to be close, then there is the option of disallowing self-delete once something is answered *and* immediately pulling the question into the help and improvement queue. Because at this point it has an answer, *someone* cared enough about it to write one, and that answer could help improve the question more. 

If that doesn't turn out to be close, and it looks like we'd be leaving a lot of litter around for longer - the proposed option *could* be adjusted a little bit to better indicate "someone other than the question asker obviously cares about this".

But this is something I'd like to tighten up. We'll be back with numbers.