Over the last several years, I've noticed a trend where people delete their resolved threads in order to avoid looking foolish, or to "unclutter" this forum.

Everyone asks questions. Sometimes, the questions are foolish. But everyone has those moments. There is no shame in asking a question and having it answered.

As for the clutter issue, the more cluttered this forum is, the better. That means we have many, many answers to the same questions to pick from. When people have the same problem in the future, they will be able to look back at answered threads.

Why should you avoid deleting your thread?

I and many others put a lot of time and effort into answering questions here. We do this for the benefit of the community and to help bring up new programmers. Sometimes, a concept takes a lot of time to explain properly, or a particular solution can take a while to put together. When we spend an hour or more putting together a solution for someone and it gets deleted, we can't refer someone else to that solution in the future, and good information gets lost. This hurts the community and makes helping people more time-consuming, frustrating, and therefore makes those of us who spend our time here less able or willing to give solid answers to issues that crop up again in the future.

This is becoming a much more common issue. Several times this week, I've gone into my post history to find a couple of threads that I had saved for future reference to find that a good number of them were deleted by their posters.

Please be considerate to the people helping you and to future learners. Leave resolved posts up particularly if they contain a useful code snippet or an in-depth explanation.