Hello. I would like to ask a follow up question to this comment on a question that I asked on meta about an hour ago (math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/35389/…). I don't want to put too much back-and-forth in the comments for the question. I hope it is acceptable to ask here instead.

@GregNisbet there is a good chance that the poor question gets deleted as well. Also when we select dupe target it has some upvoted answers.

I have mentioned an example in your meta post (via comment) where a poor question was deleted but some user got so interested in the mathematical problem that they wrote a new question based on it. I then provided an answer.

@amWhy I am told by CMs that this is a per site setting and I think it can be done for any site if their mods request it.

@GregNisbet Questions cannot be closed as a duplicate if the target does not have an (upvoted or accepted) Answer. This is a system restriction to prevent situations like you describe - if the target question has no answers, the potential duplicate can't be answered by them.

@GregNisbet (and also @Nij, for a sense of what the local procedures are) you might find this helpful: math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/32402 .

The above link goes to: Guidelines for context edits and rewrites. (Just to make the transcript more readable - to have here at least the title without the need to click on the link.)

When a mod happens to be available, I flagged an answer of mine of which I was alerted of an edit attempt on a former answer of mine. The suggested edit amounted to "vandalism". I linked the "suggested edit". The user has been a member for 2+years, but has no posts on our site (math.se), and only one post (network-wide) on puzzling. I will keep alert for any further edit attempts, but I suspect this is from a former math.se user. Just heads up.