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sawa, for whatever reason, is removing his answers to questions by replacing the text with a bunch of periods. Examples here, here, and here.

I don't know why he's doing this, but I can't say I care either. I just care about the fact that perfectly good information that could be of benefit to site visitors and users is being tampered with so as to be of no use to anyone.

Surely destroying information, especially information that is community approved and accepted as answers, is not what Stack Exchange is all about.

I could rollback the source, but that seems a mere bandaid and does not remedy the behaviour that motivated it.

What is the community's preferred approach to dealing with this? Does this merit moderator action?

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  • I wonder if it's a bug. I believe once or twice my edits turned into something like that.
    – Louis Waweru
    Commented Dec 28, 2011 at 20:41
  • @Louis: Four times (at least) in a row by the same user, acting on answers to a specific user's questions? That's a hell of a coincidental bug.
    – Questioner
    Commented Dec 29, 2011 at 1:09
  • 1
    Ah, didn't notice all that.
    – Louis Waweru
    Commented Dec 29, 2011 at 1:35
  • Maybe he just felt that other answers were more deserving of being the accepted answer?
    – Flaw Mod
    Commented Jan 27, 2012 at 11:50
  • @Flaw: I think that is extending the benefit of the doubt way, way too far. I actually think it's pretty clear why he does it, but I just don't want to get bogged down in personal conflicts. But in any case, I think he is missing the point of the site. Information is not "owned" by one person once contributed here. The community decides what to keep and what to discard. He doesn't "own" those answers and decide whether people should have them or not, regardless of his motivation.
    – Questioner
    Commented Jan 28, 2012 at 2:49

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I think flagging would be a better course of action.

Rolling them back would result in some form of edit-war until one party gives up rolling back or the other gives up deleting.

2
  • Seems a moderator has taken notice as a result of asking here, so I guess we'll see what happens in this case. However, my take away learning will be to flag for moderator attention should this happen again.
    – Questioner
    Commented Dec 28, 2011 at 15:54
  • If an edit war ensures, the posts can always be locked by a moderator. As a matter of fact, edit wars themselves automatically trigger a moderator flag, so you get extra attention on the specific posts in question.
    – Troyen
    Commented Dec 28, 2011 at 20:03
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Flag a moderator.

The thread about the last time someone did this on JLU appears to have been removed, so I don't have a direct reference, but this topic might be relevant. Those all look like accepted answers.

Also, seems like you should roll them back.

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