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I just figured out a potential difficulty with one of the badges I'm not certain whether this should be migrated to Meta SE (I'm not sure if the badge system is the same for all sites). But there is a badge called "Disciplined" which requires you to delete a post with a score of three, first of all does this include questions?

If so what if deleting the question resulted in your account being locked down? I know there's a bit of common sense telling me not to delete questions that have answers but how then would you get the badge?

Edit

After seeing a question that didn't appear in the related section but is quite relevant... I realise that this badge is targeted to similar answers... if so it is not clearly stated on the badge... can I suggest an edit to the badge description to encourage answers being deleted as opposed to questions because "post" suggests both in my opinion.

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It applies to both questions and answers. Note that you cannot delete a question when it has positively scored or accepted answers anyway. That kind of behavior is discouraged anyway—and if you tried deleting a question with (non-positively scored) answers, you'd get another warning message.

The idea is to encourage users to delete no longer useful content, even if it gathered upvotes at some point. Deleting a positively scored question does not have a considerable impact on your account's standing and should not cause a question ban. In fact, if you have a question that got three upvotes you'd probably have to have several negatively scored questions to be even in remote danger of becoming banned.

But since we don't know the algorithm behind the question ban, this is just an assumption.

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  • I guess... that's the thought chain I had but will it not discourage people from trying to get that badge if they think they will be locked out... say if they were close to being banned before deleting the post? it seems this badge is encouraging discouraged site behaviour to a certain degree...
    – ThunderToes
    Commented May 18, 2015 at 9:46
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    Actually, if you're close to being banned you should've received a message before posting a question. It may discourage people, but I guess that's already too much thinking. Many people don't know about the quality bans and many will probably get the badge by accident. And if you're hunting for badges you probably don't care about the quality bans so much either.
    – slhck Mod
    Commented May 18, 2015 at 9:49
  • Hmm surely if it was an old question they may have come close to being banned long after the question was asked?
    – ThunderToes
    Commented May 18, 2015 at 9:54
  • That's right. I guess that if this really happened to someone and they didn't know about an impending ban, we'd try to work things out and get the user unbanned.
    – slhck Mod
    Commented May 18, 2015 at 10:22
  • Yeah I guess we could try and forecast multiple situations where this would be a problem but its mainly down to common sense at the end of the day. How about putting a warning on the badge too as well as when deleting posts so people are FULLY aware.
    – ThunderToes
    Commented May 18, 2015 at 10:23
  • I'd rather be for a general warning that deleting posts may have a negative impact, but at the same time we should really be encouraging people to clean up obsolete or wrong content. But perhaps something like that has been suggested on MSE before? I'd need to look...
    – slhck Mod
    Commented May 18, 2015 at 10:43
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    Do people who are close to being unable to post questions or answers honestly ever really care about badges?
    – Ramhound
    Commented May 18, 2015 at 13:20

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