Why can't you delete questions?

Why cant you delete questions? I am assuming there is a reason that function was not introduced?

93% of people find our site from a search engine, like Google. Or Yahoo, or AOL, or Microsoft, or Ask, etc. If we removed all the questions...well, you wouldn't have found our site.

And, if it's anonymous, then it's not in your profile, and we highly, strongly discourage people from putting in personal info in their questions. Also, if we see personal info in questions, we remove it, so it's as close to anonymous as possible (even before you mark it anonymous).

And as Steph pointed out, it lowers the value of the site, as we get 50K visitors per day, a lot of them have the same questions people have already asked, and they benefit from what's here. Without those, the same questions would be asked, over & over...and it'd be less useful, overall.

Also, many other question / answer sites don't allow you to delete your profile, while we do, if you no longer wish to use the service.

And, if you really want something deleted, feel free to let me know & I'll help out. We're here to try to make the world a better place Not make people upset.

Though, and I hate to remind people of this, the Terms of Service (which you must agree to in order to use the site) say explicitly that you agree to let us use your question and or answer content, permanently, etc, etc.

If you go to you homepage and click on "my questions" you can make questions anonymous by clicking the red words "Make with question anonymous" and them they dissapear a bit later

Basically because someone in the future may have the exact same question, so they can search it and find answers that way instead of having to ask it and wait for responses. Also, there are so many people working for this site and they are always really busy. They work on things that need to be done to improve the site, and it would be pointless to take time away from doing those things to delete questions that really don't need to be deleted.

So, overall my answer is. If they deleted questions right left and center like that, there would be no questions left to use the search engine. Questions only get deleted if they are against the Terms of Use or if the user has a really, really good reason why they want their question deleted. Most of the time we just suggest that they make the question anonymous if they don't want it under their personal name.

I think for reference purposes.