Lost my answer on deleted question

Question

Note; I have read Show all of my question/answers to me even if they are deleted but I didn't see an answer to my question.

A couple of days ago, I answered a question for a new user, and I worked on my answer for about 40 minutes. The question didn't receive any downvotes, and wasn't marked as a duplicate or anything, but the next day the question was deleted by the user.

All I can figure is I answered the user's question, or he solved it himself, and he deleted the question, either because he thought he was supposed to or didn't want to mark my answer as so for some reason. The question he asked is asked fairly often in the XNA tag, and so I was surprised it wasn't marked as a duplicate (I guess this is because no one really provided a complete answer to any of the other questions...).

So this is really bothering me: There's no way for me to get my answer back?

If someone asks the question again, I would like to just be able to repost what I had before (since it doesn't exist anymore). Or even because this question is asked fairly often (I did google searches for it a couple years ago and could only find a Microsoft example that doesn't exist now), I would like to ask and answer my own question, but I don't really want to type out the whole answer again. So I guess these are my two questions:

1. There's no way for me to see my own answer?
2. When something like this happens, is it okay to post and answer my own question about it?

Answer 1

There's no way for me to see my own answer?

You can ask here and a 10k user can look at it and recover the full post for you; I quoted the full answer below.

You can certainly repost the question (but do attribute it to the original asker), but I've flagged the post for moderator attention instead. I see no reason for that question to be deleted, that post should just be un-deleted, and voted to undelete myself. If a moderator or enough 10k+ users agree, it'll be moved back to being visible.

If I were you, I would create a ScreenManager class. You could start with something like this:

public class ScreenManager
{
    List<GameScreen> screens;
    bool isinitialized = false;

    public override void Initialize()
    {
        base.Initialize();
        isinitialized = true;
    }

    protected override void LoadContent()
    {
         foreach (GameScreen screen in screens)
             screen.LoadContent();
    }

    public void AddScreen(GameScreen screen)
    {
        screens.Add(screen);
        if (isinitialized) screen.LoadContent();
    }

    // also create a removescreen

    public void Draw(Gametime gametime)
    {
        foreach (GameScreen screen in screens)
        {
            screen.Draw(gametime);
        }
    }
    // also create a similar method for Updating
}

You could make ScreenManager a DrawableGameComponent (recommended), or you could have the maingame call ScreenManager.Update() and ScreenManager.Draw() in it's respective methods. Finally, you'd have to create an abstract GameScreen class that has update and draw methods, and then have all your other Game Screens inherit from the GameScreen class. hopefully this will give you some ideas.

Answer 2

If you've provided a good answer to a question that was deleted by the user, and you don't believe it should have been, you can always flag the question (or one of your own posts, if you can't see the question) and let us know about it. We can see the history of deleted posts on your account, and can undelete the appropriate question if we think it should be restored. I might not overrule the community if they were the ones who voted to delete it, but I usually restore questions that the asker removed in this fashion (I don't like it when people decide to take their ball and go home).

Someone flagged this question, so I saw it and was able to undelete the question. Your answer now has an upvote on it, which will prevent the user from deleting this same question by themselves again.

Answer 3

There's no way for me to see my own answer?

Google Cache FTW

You could also earn 10k reputation on the site ;)

If the Google cache doesn't have it, doesn't have a sufficiently recent version, or you can't find it there, then the next place to go would be to use the "contact us" option on the site footer to contact someone on the site who will be able to provide you with your content.

When something like this happens, is it okay to post and answer my own question about it?

Yes, it most certainly is. That said, you should properly attribute any content that is not your own.

And of course, if you're going to post the question yourself then you're saying that you feel it is a quality question, and are willing to accept responsibility for that. If it's not a quality question you either shouldn't post it, or fix it up into a quality question first. Posting a bad question just as a placeholder for an answer (even a very good answer) is not appropriate. The question and answer will each be judged independently, even when self-answering, and both should be of high quality.