I'm not gonna call this completed; as you and everyone else reading this know, we do still throw away some votes for some user-deletions... and probably always will for the reasons you noted in your proposal.
But we have a system in place to prevent the most disruptive forms of vote deletion, and we've been using it for a while now without major issues. For the foreseeable future, this is as completed as it is gonna get.
Here's how it works:
- There are two thresholds:
- Number of votes cast by the user being deleted
- Number of people affected significantly by those votes
The exact values of those thresholds don't particularly matter; they're pretty low, but not so low that you could hit them easily while still hiding fraudulent activity.
- If either threshold is exceeded, deletion is held up until someone reviews it. Otherwise, deletion proceeds and any votes are discarded.
- If, during review, it becomes apparent that the user isreviewer comes across some reason why the votes should or ever wasnot be preserved (e.g. the user is or was involved in voting fraud), the votes are discardedstill reversed as they would normally be.
- Otherwise, the votes are preserved (moved to the Community user).
The end result of this is that most users will still see votes being removed along with user deletions from time to time... But rarely if everrarely will these votes cause a non-trivial drop in reputation, or a sudden, wide-spreadwidespread skew in post scores, which were the primary complaints in the past.