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What harm did it do anyone, especially after its low score got it off the main page? Do the mods realise that they're also deleting contributions from numerous other people who may, in fact, be interested in continuing the discussion with the hope that perhaps that fellow might see sense after all?

I feel we ought to explicitly refrain from closing questions on the basis of their quality, provided they're on topic and not offensive, which despite one person's rather random claims to the contrary that question was not. With a voting mechanism in place (and affecting a post's visibility), this is the kind of moderatorial voluntarism that I've seen ruin online communities before.

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First of all, we are talking here about a question that've been quite actively downvoted. Second, I was not the only user who raised some concerns about this question - this question've been voted to be closed.

Third, this question didn't follows our rules - it was unclear what was actually asked. The "one question / one answer" is one of the cornerstones of SE sites.

Those thing were enough to make me close this question but on top of that some very unrelevant political discussion arose and biased the whole sense of the existence of this question towards some flame war to that extent that the question was impossible to "save". Had I edit it and constantly delete all off-topic comments new and new will be added without any value to Russian SE.

This was an exceptional case. I had hard times not only deciding to delete it - right after SE management reached me and raised some serious questions about why that was done and were my actions justified.

So, in short, it was a bad question and I'd deleted it just because of this - this is a regular case, it was exceptionally bad question that tended to split the community - and I had to take exceptional measures. I do not regret.

Also, just to let you know, the aftermath of this was this question on Meta - Should we explicitely mark political discussions as off-topic?

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  • Thank you. My thinking was that its massive downvotes were enough; being a rare exception, it wasn't that big of an eyesore and perhaps even served as a clearer example of what questions not to ask. Should questions like that become a chronic problem, the moderation could always reactively become stricter. I do realise, though, that it's not my call.
    – Nikolay Ershov
    Apr 24, 2016 at 5:50
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It wasn't me who closed this question, and I wouldn't have closed it, but I would ban the OP after their very first response to Anixx in the comments to the original post.

It's obvious that the OP is trolling and is not able (or willing) to be swayed by means of reason and logic.

I also see no purpose in a discussion with a troll. This should be done in a chat, preferably a private one.

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