I think this was supposed to show the crap Stack Overflow power users have to deal with, but I think it more clearly shows some of the worst qualities of the Stack Overflow moderation system.<p>With a large caveat that moderators have the ability to scrub context from a problem question (e.g., comments) and user (e.g., deleting their past submissions), this is what appears to the outside world:<p>* A new user asks what they think is a dumb question.<p>* They get an answer. Still thinking it was a dumb question and not knowing how Stack Overflow works, attempts to blank out the question and request deletion.<p>* A user with 22k rep (i.e., a power user) goes in and rolls back the question.<p>* The asker rolls back the rollback.<p>At this point, the appropriate thing to do is flag the question for a moderator (important addendum: <i>and move on</i>). That doesn't happen. Instead:<p>* The power user—who really should know better—gets into a petty rollback war with the asker, and the question gets reverted 15 times in 5 minutes before <i>another</i> power user steps in and reverts it.<p>* The roll back wars stop, but an hour later a diamond moderator steps in and locks the question anyway. (Correction: I originally said it was unlocked 45 minutes later, but child comments correctly point out it was unlocked automatically a week later).<p>* The asker, who by all appearances has asked a single question, gets banned for 15 years.[1]<p>* The question, while not the best question ever, is decent enough and gets interesting answers but somehow gets a -35 score (edit: now down to -41 in the 20 minutes since I posted this comment), making it one of the worst questions on the site.[2] The comments[3] speculate that it was due to the edit war. So much for voting on a question instead of the person.<p>It's stuff like this that drives people up the wall when it comes to Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, and it happens way too easily (I know I slipped into it a few times during my time as a Stack Exchange power user).<p>[1]: <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/users/2398036/user2398036" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/users/2398036/user2398036</a><p>[2]: The questions page, when sorted by votes, only goes to -27 on page 410,195: <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions?page=410195&sort=votes" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions?page=410195&sort=votes</a><p>[3]: <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16630713/is-it-true-in-python-that-you-can-import-specific-functions-from-a-module-unlike#comment29684251_16630713" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16630713/is-it-true-in-py...</a>