I've had the following happen to me twice within the past few days:

I struggle with a problem for three or four hours. Eventually I give in and post asking for help. While I wait for the help I continue working on the problem. An hour or two down the road I figure out the issue on my own. As such, I no longer need the topic I created. I'd like to delete it so as not to waste people's time (and clutter up the sub forum), but I don't have the privileges to do so.

Being able to delete your own topics would allow users to self moderate, and cut down on the amount of useless stuff. If you are worried about useful answers getting deleted you could make it so a user could only delete a topic if no one else had replied to it.

Just a thought.

I feel bad about wasting people's time for something I could clean up myself given the chance.

well you wouldn't be wasting user's time if you edit your post with the solution. And I do not mean editing your post to say "resolved please delete this thread". I mean after your question write the solution and then a moderator can modify the topic title to say [Resoloved] in front and users who wish to help do not need to waist their time, but by adding the answer behind your problem/question you are giving help to any of those who may be having the same issue as you. Just because you can figure it out doesn't mean everybody else can. If the topics are kept alive with their original questions they can benefit others much more than if you edit them or delete them.

Well, there many pros and cons to this. If a topic is deleted, the other users who post in it will lose credits. You though would be able to delete topics you make that you either find an answer right after you post or you post a double topic on accident. Maybe a time limit could be put on, or a user can delete the topic before anybody posts on it. Maybe at least the ability to close topics could be given.

Coolcat is correct that would be the biggest issue in allowing people to delete posts or topics, because everyone who posted there would lose credits 1.5x over for every post they made, and so alex's post covers that fact when you someone has a problem instead of asking for the topic to be delete is to put the solution, report the topic as resolved and then have it close. For all you know other people could be having a similar problem and if they see a similar topic and has a effective solution then you really benefiting the forums and the users as they have a good source of information to rely on.

Yeah it is understandable how easy it takes to just to delete a post once a solution is found and don't require any help, but a forum like this can be used as a giant knowledge base to help other users out and not forum members. Also since this is a hosting website it has many more benefits because now the users don't have to keep on posting the same topic for a solution that is already on the forum.

As previous users have stated, it will allow others searching for the same answer to see how to fix the problem if they also have it. It was previously made that topics are deleted by users after they made huge spam posts because it would allow users to keep their credits. When topics are removed now, they are not deleted right away but instead are moved until an administrator can correctly deduct credits for those participating in spam or whatever reason the topic was removed. Thus people could go about sabotaging anyone by deleting their own topic even if there were 30 replies to it thus hurting everyone severely because when topics are deleted, many more hosting credits are removed than those gained from the post originally. This is because when a topic is deleted it is automatically seen as a penalty.