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Small proposal to change "No deleted recent answers" and "No deleted recent questions" in the new recently deleted Q/A pages to "No recently deleted answers" and "No recently deleted questions" respectively. The HTML <head> title should change too.

It make more grammatical sense to me.

Unless it is recent questions/answers deleted as opposed to it being recently deleted. If this is the case then "No recent answers/questions deleted" would be better as well as a URL change.

If you are not aware of the pages I'm talking about, check these (replacing <user-id> with your own):
http://stackoverflow.com/users/recently-deleted-questions/<user-id>
http://stackoverflow.com/users/recently-deleted-answers/<user-id>

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    The first suggests the post is recently posted (deleted whenever), the second suggests it was deleted recently (posted whenever). As I believe it is the second one in reality I agree with you Commented Aug 12, 2013 at 12:17
  • @Richard Well if it is recently posted then the URL should change
    – Bo A
    Commented Aug 12, 2013 at 12:19
  • Added a note on that to the post.
    – Bo A
    Commented Aug 12, 2013 at 12:21
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    I mean, the URL gets it right. It is strange that the page title does not match. Adverbs are wonderful things.
    – Cody Gray
    Commented Aug 12, 2013 at 12:26
  • N.b. calling these bugs is often seen as overkill. This is probably a discussion or possibly a small feature request Commented Aug 12, 2013 at 12:28
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    @RichardTingle So are you saying spelling/grammar errors are not bugs and are intended? Bugs can be as minor as spelling and grammar errors.
    – Bo A
    Commented Aug 12, 2013 at 12:30
  • @BoA well they intended to write it that way. You (in my opinion correctly) believe it should be worded differently but its not like it got mangled somewhere in the network and gibberish was shown. You could argue that a spelling mistake could be called (at a stretch) a bug but if the communication between brain and computer went through correctly then its not a bug Commented Aug 12, 2013 at 12:35
  • See here where a similar suggestion of mine was suggested to be retagged Inconsistent tag badge text Commented Aug 12, 2013 at 12:36
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    I don't think that's the same thing, @Richard. Your question is asking for clarification. Spelling/grammar errors are bugs. If it is determined that this is, in fact, not a bug, it can be easily retagged.
    – Cody Gray
    Commented Aug 12, 2013 at 12:38
  • @CodyGray They're both asking for the wording to be changed somewhere on the site to increase the clarity of whats being said Commented Aug 12, 2013 at 12:41
  • From what I've seen, it's definitely not the second case. I recently had (apparently) an old answer disappear and it never showed up in my "No deleted recent answers" list.
    – Mysticial
    Commented Aug 28, 2013 at 20:54
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    If a post has been deleted and it was not originally posted recently, it won't appear in there. Commented Oct 19, 2013 at 5:48
  • Interesting point about what is considered a bug - On some subsites (Unix & Linux, for example), the phrasing of the bug tag doesn't include spelling/grammar errors.
    – user66001
    Commented Oct 20, 2013 at 23:02

1 Answer 1

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These pages have long been confusing to many people, as can be seen by your question. The phrasing we chose was actually correct in describing the actual content of the page - questions or answers that had been posted within the last sixty days that were deleted. So, in that sense, your question would have been . That said, what you're asking us to call the page and what the URLs say is actually a much more useful collection of content - questions and answers that were deleted in the last sixty days, regardless of when they were posted.

So, earlier this week the wonderful Yaakov fixed this up for us and he was kind enough to update the link text to match and add some more descriptive text to the pages so that users who do stumble onto these pages will actually know what they contain.

The questions page now reads

Recently Deleted Questions

This page shows questions you asked that were deleted in the last 60 days.

Screenshot of the page with the new text - "Recently Deleted Questions. This page shows questions you asked that were deleted in the last 60 days."

And the answers page reads:

Recently Deleted Answers.

This page shows answers you posted that were deleted in the last 60 days. This includes answers to questions that were deleted.

Screenshot of the page with the new text - "Recently Deleted Answers. This page shows answers you posted that were deleted in the last 60 days. This includes answers to questions that were deleted."

We also updated the link text to these pages so it reflects their new purpose.

I hope you all enjoy being able to see all of the content you've created that's been deleted for any sort of reason, at least for a short period of time. This means that if you check these pages occasionally, you should know when any of your content is removed.

At this point in time, we're not looking at extending the window of time this shows but I hope this interim step will increase transparency somewhat.

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