To be fair, I'm a moderator on another forum (a phpBB one), and users deleting or gutting their own posts is an occasional problem there. User comes along, posts a question, gets a reply, and then they delete their Q post as if it was not community property, leaving just the orphaned replies. Very annoying! However, the normal way to handle this would be to enable edits and deletes only after the user has established a reputation.
That is one option. You could also prevent deleting posts once they have been posted for a certain time. But currently I am able to remove the content of the post, which is basicly the same as deleting the post.