264

Motivation

This proposal comes from the discussion that occurred on this question: How did OP delete his question which has an answer?

This answer on an other question states:

when a question gets deleted, the answerers lose access to their posts.

This behaviour led to this remark from Robert Crovella:

From answerer's perspective, it's kind of annoying when this happens.

We might all agree that losing a good answer we made just because the OP deleted his question right after he had teh codez, can be frustrating.

While the amount of questions killing a singleton answer while committing suicide represents only 0.6% of open questions scoring greater than or equal to 0 with at least one answer, this behaviour can be really harmful to the motivation of answerers, and especially the ones with <10K rep, which can't even access their own answer anymore.

Proposition

When a question, with a singleton answer scored at 0, is deleted by its owner:

  • The answerer should get a notification around those lines[1]:

    One of your answers got deleted because of the original question's deletion by its owner. You may retrieve it in your recently deleted answers list.

  • Users with less than 10K rep, should still be able to access their answer [, and the question].

Benefits

  • This would allow answerers to get their work back.
  • If they think their answer is valuable enough, answerers will be able to write a new self-answered question. The access to the deleted question can also be needed in order to write an improved question from the original one, and get more views than the original give me teh codez version would have got.

Appendix

It may be needed to perform a check on the new question's content to avoid a simple carbon-copy of the deleted one.

27
  • 158
    +1 I would generalize this: A <10K answerer should always have access to his answer (and possibly the corresponding question), regardless who deleted the question.
    – user000001
    Commented Jan 3, 2016 at 7:55
  • 2
    @user000001, I thought it would create some issues with questions flagged as offensive or spam, and for moderation issues. I don't know how long it takes for a question to be removed in these cases, and I guess that allowing only answers to be accessible is a lot more difficult than this proposal. Hence this limitation in my original post, but I may include it if your comment get enough upvotes. At least you've got mine.
    – Kaiido
    Commented Jan 3, 2016 at 8:19
  • 7
    @user000001: I'd weaken it to always visible unless it has a negative score or wasn't flagged for being offensive. Having i always available may be risky.
    – Makoto
    Commented Jan 3, 2016 at 8:39
  • 13
    From the cases I'm aware of where an asker deletes their question after getting an answer, they've all been gimme-teh-codez or it-doesnt-work-why-please-help-me-oh-god-please-URGENT. My view is that those types of question should have been closed in the first place (too broad / unclear what you're asking / duplicate), so I don't have much sympathy for lost answers. I can see the annoyance, but since it potentially discourages answering those types of questions, I think it's actually a positive effect overall (rare cases will always break the trend, but moderators can handle those).
    – Dave
    Commented Jan 4, 2016 at 12:42
  • 10
    @Gorbles: If >10k users can access it, then the data exists, so I would be surprised to hear there is a specific backend constraint preventing exposing it to other users.
    – Matthieu M.
    Commented Jan 4, 2016 at 12:50
  • 4
    @Dave, while I agree on the nature of such questions, it may also happen they bring some very good answers. In this case, it's even more frustrating to see your answer deleted because of a selfish asker. The proposal if implemented would allow to turn this in a self-answered, improved, question. The ones who only dump teh codez or quick fix probably won't go to this. They won't win any rep and the "positive effect" you see, would still apply, and would even be improved thanks to the notification.
    – Kaiido
    Commented Jan 4, 2016 at 12:56
  • 2
    @MatthieuM. - in principle I agree, the only caveat being load-based, user spread is such that > 10k will be a very minor set of the overall userbase (or even compared to > 1k and < 10k). I'm familiar with database stuff, but by no means an expert, and elsewhere on the Web I'm used to being shouted at for absolutes, heh.
    – Gorbles
    Commented Jan 4, 2016 at 12:59
  • 4
    @Kaiido: I'm not against a notification (it would be nice to get a few more notifications than the system currently gives). It's being able to see the content which I'm opposed to (potential risks include carbon-copies as you already noted, backlashes against the OP, and confusion about whether content is visible to others; e.g. link sharing). Remember that once you reach 10k, you'll be able to see all deleted content anyway, and there's even a search "deleted:1" to find all of your own deleted content.
    – Dave
    Commented Jan 4, 2016 at 13:03
  • 6
    Sadly, every variation of requesting that <10K users can access their content (when it's an answer to a deleted question) has always been declined. meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2645/… seems to be the 'mother' of this request and contains most of the pro/con that have been discussed about this. @Dave: didn't know about "deleted:1", thanks for that! Good to know that when I finally start collecting brownie/unicorn points (rep above 10K) that 'problem' is solved in a efficient manner.
    – GitaarLAB
    Commented Jan 4, 2016 at 17:32
  • 4
    On the other hand, allowing this might lower the motivation to reach 10k :)
    – Leeor
    Commented Jan 4, 2016 at 17:41
  • 6
    @Sumurai8, That's kinda sad, since it beats the goal of StackOverflow as I understand it (or as I understand the community sees it) - it's supposed to be a vault of useful information in a Q&A format, not a voluntary random question answering service.
    – Leeor
    Commented Jan 4, 2016 at 18:20
  • 3
    @Dave the statistics in the question represent questions which are not downvoted nor closed that are removed shortly after the user gets an answer. This is meant to show the trend of users to ask a question, get the answer they were looking for, then delete their question. Yes this feature request would allow you to view your own answer on more questions than just these, but for users who spend time writing a useful answer to a useful question, only to have the rug pulled out from underneath them by the OP, this would be a way to get that work back and put it to good use.
    – user4639281
    Commented Jan 4, 2016 at 18:45
  • 2
    @Leeor The ultimate goal is that. The larger community seems to view it differently. When I answer questions in tags as javascript, I am always the last of 3 or 4, because I want to actually explain what I am doing, have a concise styling, etc. When I answer questions in low-traffic tags such as .htaccess, I have people closing the question because they find that more or less amateur setups should go to serverfault, even though it is off-topic there, or no-one with 15+ reps looks at the answer.
    – Sumurai8
    Commented Jan 4, 2016 at 18:48
  • 2
    Anyway, this feature would not add much. Most answers are not worth keeping. Unless someone asks the same question again, you can likely not use them again. You can look at them every now and then, but you already had the knowledge. It's easier to write another answer than to go through extra hoops just to get a previous answer to use on a different question.
    – Sumurai8
    Commented Jan 4, 2016 at 18:54
  • 3
    @user1354557 if you mean me, I fully agree with the feature request. My response was only suggesting (in a clearly unclear way) to not allow low-reps to see the answers of others on deleted questions. So I suggest concentrating on "seeing own deleted posts", with the unavoidable generalization to "seeing deleted questions to which your answer is linked".
    – Andras Deak -- Слава Україні
    Commented Jan 4, 2016 at 22:12

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Marking this completed, because the really critical bit is done - but I'll note straight away that the notification you outline will probably never happen (notifying people about deleted posts has nearly always led to problems unless there's a clear course of action for the person being notified).

That being said, if you have a link to your answer - or look in the "recent deleted answers" list on your profile - you'll now be able to view it, even if you don't have 10K. This should help to reduce frustration and also allow answerers to identify cases of abuse (where the asker is selfishly trying to keep a good answer to themselves for whatever reason).

2
  • I've noticed that as an answerer of a deleted question, I couldn't expand the comments under the question, which contained an explanation of why the question had been closed.
    – m69 ''snarky and unwelcoming''
    Commented Nov 15, 2018 at 15:17
  • That sounds plausible; the permissions check that allows you to see the question is predicated on you having answered, but pulling comments does no such check.
    – Shog9
    Commented Nov 15, 2018 at 17:23

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