Pet peeve of the day: people who post a question, then disappear for a few days instead of checking back a couple of times in the first few hours and again within 24 hours to see what clarifications people seek. If you don't really care about your question, why should we?

@Glen_b exactly. Totally agree.

I feel within a business week is still reasonable. There are legitimate reasons for someone to not be available for a day or two. If someone doesn't come back to the question sooner than that then I assume they forgot or didn't care to improve the question.

@Galen sure. But if the question is dire, you ought to wait, after all you bothered to write up the whole post, submitted it at the first place.

Sometimes they do visit but not respond to an answer given. Did you understand it? Did you not? Hello?

I think it's fairly incumbent to wait to post until you can respond; it doesn't take a minute to check a couple of times (though you don't need to respond the second you see there was a question, you might wait a little to see if there were several). Among other things, askers who wait a week to respond are tanking the immediate views an answer might gather. They also reduce the chances of getting any good answer at all.

Which goes to my point about caring; unless the question is fascinating, I have too many other things to care about for that to be worthwhile.

I wonder: should we include something like this in our "how to ask" help page (which AFAICT nobody reads)? "After you have posted a question, people may ask for clarification. If you reply promptly to such requests, you have a better chance of getting a useful answer. So check your inbox regularly after you post your question."

@StephanKolassa I won't have any problem with such addition. But at one point, we need to think whether even the basic of basic things that would be expected as implicit in their actions need to be explicitly added in the help page.

And as you said, and as I routinely come across, hardly any newbie takes a tour. Most often they would have a desperate plea and suddenly they vanish! Of course, I am not generalizing at all.

@Glen_b I take action by checking back after 24 hours on any post where I left a comment asking for clarification. If there has been no response, I vote to close it.

(Some might ask why I don't wait a week or so before acting. The reason is that it's impracticable: the site offers no software support for such followup, forcing me to go through my history manually. A week typically covers dozens of pages, which is too much to review -- and I will have forgotten the original post in the meantime.)

This post is being constantly vandalized by its author. I have rolled it back twice.

If author wishes to remove it, can't they delete it altogether? I thought unanswered, downvoted and closed questions get automatically deleted after few days.

@User1865345 When that happens, please flag the post for mod attention. We can prevent changes for a specified time period to help the OP resolve the issues they might be having. If those issues concern inadvertently showing privileged information, we can fully redact the post and its edit history to erase that information from the site altogether.

Sure @whuber.

Ah, that's the q. that had 500 lines of code (& no data) to start with. I suspect you'd need to be very familiar with the particular area of application to succeed in guessing what it's about. I've explained to the O.P. how to delete it should they wish.

This is a useful guide to redaction: