If the original poster of a question wishes to delete it, do we delete?

Question

The relevant question is this one.

The OP tried to delete it, but was reverted. Should we delete it, or leave it as is (with potential negative consequences for the OP if identified)?

Answer 1

OPs do not in general have a right to delete their posts, though in limited circumstances where the question has essentially received no positive attention they will have such an option available to them. Once something positive happens, the option to delete is gone, and deletion only happens for substantial breaches of site policies, or automatically by the system when certain specific conditions are met. Upvoted but off-topic, upvoted but otherwise bad, or personally awkward questions are generally not worthy of this, as they still serve a useful purpose for the overall maintenance of the site.

The OP could be asked if they wish to have the post dissociated from their account. Everyone has that right under the license every post is made under. The post could also probably be anonymized a bit. It contains a fair amount of rather specific and unnecessary details, and prototypical panic phrasing. With some effort I think someone could strip it of a lot of the particular details and fix the phrasing to something less emotional. A flag for moderator attention could then be raised, requesting that the revision history be scrubbed/redacted (else we wouldn't actually be doing much to prevent the OP from being identified from the post's contents). If existing answers contain significant amounts of quotes or other restatements of the original posting then things get complicated, but perhaps that would be the poor and helpful mod's problem. But there's a limit to what we can achieve to protect an OP from making a bad decision and saying too much: there are other ways of figuring out who the original poster was, and what the post originally said, no matter how much the mods try to scrub the evidence from the site itself.

Even if a thusly-modified version of the question was left closed, this still serves a useful purpose for this SE. We can use it to close similar questions as duplicates and not really have to force ourselves to explain and fight about why it is or isn't off-topic.