Yesterday I came across a rather unfortunate situation where a question was posed that was invalid and later removed by moderators ("Are there examples of..." type question) that had been provided with a well written, sources response incl. several quotes. When the question was removed, the response was also deleted. Given the length and quality of the response, I felt it is a real shame that the response is lost. My assumptions it that it was removed because of the invalid question, not because the response itself did not meet quality standards.
This makes me wonder: how common is this? I there value in thinking about "preserving" responses that meet the high standards of AskHistorians but have the unfortunate flaw of having answered a question that will be removed. Maybe lock the thread instead of blanking it out?
It happens fairly rarely as we do give pretty wide latitude insofar as questions with bad premises and such go, as well as the fact that since we generally manage to remove the questions that do go too far pretty quickly, it is rare to write something up to respond with in that window.
Some do fall through the cracks though, and if we are removing a question which someone does nevertheless answer for, with a response that would otherwise meet the requirements under the rules here, we always reach out to the respondent and either offer to repost a new question that does meet the requirements here, or else encourage them to repost the response in the Saturday Spotlight thread.