Show all of my question/answers to me even if they are deleted

Question

I would really like to see all of my questions and answers on the profile page, even if some of them were deleted, and I don't have enough rep to see them on the site.

(Note that some questions are automatically deleted after 30 days or 1 year, and the author might be oblivious about what happened.)

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Since February 2020, the "deleted recent [questions/answers]" links in one's own user profile now list all respective posts that were deleted in the past 60 days, rather than just those that were originally posted in the last 60 days.

Since December 2015, users with the "access to moderator tools" privilege (10k+ on "full sites", 2k+ on sites with beta-level reputation thresholds) can use the search operator deleted:1 to see all their own deleted posts.

Since June 2013, deleted questions and answers that were posted in the past 60 days, can be seen using the "deleted recent questions" and "deleted recent answers" links on the questions and answers tabs (at the bottom of the tab) in your user profile.

For older posts: as of 2013-04-23 you can view your own deleted questions if you already have a link to them, but they still aren't linked from the user profiles (not even just for you). Nor do you see inbox notifications for comments on them if you come back a few hours later. You have to have thought to bookmark your question, or you have to go digging for it in your browser history.

Answer 1

Should this be reconsidered? There are some valid points in Jeff's answer and its comments, but IMO recent changes to SO made this feature request a lot more useful (and less harmful):

• Users can no longer undelete posts deleted by moderators.
• Users can no longer instantly undelete posts deleted by someone else.
• Users with 20k+ rep can vote to delete questions immediately, reducing their exposure

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As it is, one needs 10k reputation to see deleted posts made by everyone else. But there is no reputation limit to see your own deleted answers (self-deleted or otherwise). Not only that, but answers deleted by someone else have a link to the FAQ:

Questions on the other hand will vanish without a trace for anyone with less than 10k. They'll be redirected to a 404 page, leaving users with little clue as to what happened. They also get no notifications of any kind.

I tested this by setting up a new account and asking a bad question. Unfortunately it wasn't bad enough and it was taking a while for it to get deleted, so I asked a worse question, which got promptly deleted. There are no notifications, no messages, nada — it just vanishes. (All these links are 10k only.)

Now that 20ks can delete bad questions immediately, it would help to allow anyone to see a list of their deleted questions (i.e. along with non-deleted questions) and access the deleted questions themselves. The comments and the close reason should help everyone but the most clueless to figure out what's the problem(s) with their question and hopefully prevent them from making the same mistake(s) in the future.

Answer 2

If this status-declined is not negotiable, an intermediate alternative would be to add an automatic notification to the OP when a question is automatically deleted. Even better, would be an email with the full question for the user. It might in some cases help the user reformulate the question and repost it one year later.
I would assume that if a question/answer is deleted by a mod there will be usually some kind of communication between the mod and the user. If not, then I would strongly suggest to add some notification also. I would probably not email the question/answer back in this case.

I understand the fear of masses whining, but a short message: "A question you wrote has been automatically removed after one year. For more information about why this happened, please [click here] (link to the faq)" should deter most of it, specially if the OP has a chance to read the question again (on an email, if not in the profile).
Regarding those who would complain with that, they are probably doing it now anyway (through email or here in meta), so I do not see a problem either.

Answer 3

So I was about to ask this question on Meta:

Thanks for deleting my question! May I see it now?

But I'll phrase it as an answer instead. My question was:

Should I telecommute?

Times have changed on Stack Overflow and this was a closer to on-topic question back then. I do recall that some people agitated for it being a "Community Wiki" question and I do recall thinking that it was pushing the boundaries. But now, it's clearly off-topic and I'm fine with it being deleted. It's not really my community anymore, so I have no reason to whine about it being deleted from the public view.

But what purpose does it serve to block me from seeing it? I'm not sure how much value I will get from re-reading this question and its answers, but I have other questions I find more valuable that will, no doubt, be deleted in future as the standards are further tightened.

It's not as if I can get questions undeleted even if I wanted to. People will continue to whine about deleted questions whether they can read them or not. At least if we can read our deleted question, we have an idea about where we might have gone wrong. Right?

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Now that I'm a ♦ moderator for a small site, I'm starting to see things differently:

Ok, I haven't seen this request on the site I moderate yet, but I don't look forward to it. You see, a moderator is damned if they do and damned if they don't post the text of deleted posts. On the one hand:

• everyone knows the moderators can copy the text and paste it somewhere, so you look like a jerk if you don't comply.

And on the other:

• posts were deleted for a reason and dredging them up somewhere just gives junk a bigger audience.

It's the old Streisand effect once again.

If the user has access to their deleted posts, they don't have this particular excuse to raise a ruckus on meta.

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By all means, don't show deleted posts in my profile

Jeff was kind enough to comment on my post with an argument he didn't make in his answer:

[Loss] aversion is huuuuge and showing people their deleted content, every day, on their user page is pretty much the textbook definition of it. "Gee, remember your deleted question with allll those upvotes? Look at it every single time you go to your user page. That'll remind you of what you lost, and how much you miss it. Have you considered complaining about the unfairness of that deletion today? How about tomorrow? Maybe next week? Just think about it. Every time. Forever.

While I suspect my profile won't exactly last forever, I agree that showing me my deleted posts, especially posts that got a lot of upvotes, is bad policy. This got me thinking: "Why don't we have this problem with trusted users complaining about their deleted post?" After poking around at the various sites where I have different levels of privileges I discovered:

• Low-reputation users do not see deleted questions or answers in their profiles.
• Trusted users (10k on graduated sites and 5k on betas) can see deleted answers if they are looking the question. They can also see deleted questions if they have a link. Deleted posts (even their own) are not visible on the profile.
• ♦ moderators see all posts (deleted or not) in everyone's profiles.

Now there is a way to find your deleted posts, but while anyone can see their own answers, only trusted users can see deleted questions. The upshot is, nobody but ♦ moderators and employees can see deleted content in profiles, including their own. That's a great design and I don't propose changing it. What I propose changing is if you have the URL to your own deleted question you should be able to see at least the text of the question you wrote.

Answer 4

Note: The below is outdated. Although this question has status-declined, users can see their deleted questions if they have a link to them, and they can see a list of recent deleted questions via the (far too small and subtle) "deleted recent questions" link on the Questions tab of their activity page.

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It is simply asinine not to show people their own deleted questions, with comments, at the very least.

Scenario: New user asks question and goes to lunch. It's a duplicate of an earlier one. It gets closed as a duplicate, and then three people vote to delete it. New user comes back from lunch and says "Where's my question?" Whereupon they either decide that either the Stack Exchange site in question is clearly rubbish, or they figure they messed up and ask the question again. Neither of which is remotely good for the site.

This status-declined needs to be reversed. For instance, how is the user asking this question ever going to see the comments and learn from them? It's going to be deleted any second.

Answer 5

Reasons why users should be able to see their own questions and answers in their profile page (from a moderator's perspective):

• It lessens the amount of work we need to do when a user deletes their own questions/answers and then is post banned (users can then edit their content and reflag without us having to undelete all their old content)
• It allows a user to see comments moderators left them regarding deletion of their content without having to remember the post URL
• It provides a more accurate history of the user for themselves. Just today I was looking through my old deleted material to see why it was deleted. In some cases, good material was deleted because it had no upvotes and the OP decided to delete their own question. I worry that we're losing more good content when this happens, but no one is bringing it up because they don't know about it.
• We allow users to see their closed questions, and we get at least one question a day about a question being closed. At least. I don't believe deleted content will receive more questions than that, but without data, who's to say?

This should be implemented on a trial basis. Look at the data, and then see if it's a problem. If it's a problem, then let's improve. To summarily say, "Never" to the community without data is just wrong.

Answer 6

I think there's many great answers here that have valid points and good suggestions that I think at least justifies an explanation. Since I put a bounty on it, I figured I'd drop my 2 cents as well:

To begin with, I would like to make a few quotations to outline my need to get a better answer:

Quotes that explains (or doesn't) the decision of status-declined

OP (vava):

I would really like to see all of my questions and answers on the profile page, even if some of them were deleted, and I don't have enough rep to see them on the site.

Jeff Atwood♦'s response:

Generally when things get deleted, it's for a good reason, and we don't want users to be undeleting them

Clearly he misunderstood the question. So Hendrik helped him out:

@Jeff: The question was about showing deleted questions, not about allowing users to undelete. Surely it would be possible showing them without allowing undeletion.

As you probably read by now, Jeff Atwood♦ responded:

@hendrik it would lead to unbelievable amounts of whining. Will not get implemented as long as I am still alive to prevent it from happening.

Judging from that statement, it seems to me like this request was declined based on speculation (and personal opinion).

Before I get to criticize that, I would like to hold a positive note and try listing the things about this feature that I think would give value to StackExchange:

Values for StackExchange

Implementing the suggested feature:

1. Leads to more users with better posts, because it gives askers another good way to learn from their mistakes.
2. Leads to more ad-revenue, because less new / inexperienced users are frustrated with having their question vanish into thin air and decide SE isn't a place for them.
3. Leads to less tasks to handle for support, moderators and other users with privileges to view/handle complaints in any form, because askers/answerers who lost their posts won't be complaining/asking for support for that reason.

Other than these points, it would also solve several annoyances from the users' perspective, but I tried listing it from SE's perspective, so keep in mind that I left those out.

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Maybe you ask "All these things happens rarely, why is this feature important?":

What I would like to ask back is "What is it that makes this a feature out of interest to SE?" because I can't find any good reasons not to implement this.

This is where I would like the people who knows why this was status-declined to help me out.

This may not be the most important feature, viewed from SE's side, but I cannot see how it is in the pile of "Will not get implemented as long as I am still alive to prevent it from happening".

If you've ever tried needing to view a post you can't access, you would know how incredibly frustrating it is to be in that situation. Even though this may be a minority of users, it's still important to keep in mind that this wouldn't hurt the users who don't need/want this feature (which is the majority), because like the show removed posts-feature, in the reputation tab, it could just be an optional view, as well as adding notifications of deleted posts which will of course only show up for those who had their posts deleted.

For what it's worth:

To the critique of "unbelievable amounts of whining": From what I've seen in my 4 months here, I don't really believe it. I may be blinded by my frustrating desire to view my deleted posts, but if those affected by this feel the same way, I'm even more inclined to request an explanation of the nature of this belief.

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Maybe you ask "You're just speculating yourself. How is that different from Jeff's speculation?":

My speculation isn't different, seeing as it is also speculation. We're both talking about predicting what the future would look like if this feature was implemented. The main difference is that I tried to thoroughly explain why I think this is a feature worthy of SE, which I think an as popular suggestion as this at least deserves.

Suggestions to implementation

This might be shortsighted since this might be on Jeff's blacklist for as long as he's alive, but here's to hoping that those influential on SE will reconsider:

Delete notification

What I think is by far the most important part of this feature request is notification of deletion done by other users/moderators. Currently, there is no notification at all. This only leads to unnecessary confusion and should be fairly easy to implement.

Viewing a deleted question

I think the second-most important part of this feature request is to be able to view the question of yours that was deleted. The purpose of this is to let the user see the answers and comments, which are likely to explain the reasoning. I'm unaware if it's possible for 10k+ rep users and moderators to write comments to deleted questions, to discuss them, but if so, those could be hidden from the user if necessary.

Also, to not make inexperienced users confused when viewing the deleted post there could be a message at the top of the question saying something like:

"This question was deleted by JohnDoe♦ (see the FAQ for possible explanations why your question might have been removed).

This question is only visible to:

• The user who asked the question.
• The user who answered the question.
• Moderators of this site.
• Users with 10000 reputation or more.

With possible variations like (in this case, you) and a one-liner reasoning by the moderator, if necessary.

Viewing your answer on a deleted question

Even though this shouldn't be an issue, since 10k+ users are told to review answers before deletion, I've still seen a few cases of users desiring to view and, probably most importantly, being able to copy content from answers they provided to now deleted questions.

The typical scenario I've seen is when the asker deletes his/her own question and the answerer would like to be able to access their answer to the now deleted question:

• Mottie's scenario
• Mark Booth's scenario

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I hope this was a detailed enough explanation to encourage a reconsider, or at least a more detailed reasoning of the rejection.

Answer 7

The situation has completely changed on deleted questions now that we are banning users from asking questions because of their self-deletions and bad questions.

We need to enable those users to see their deleted questions so that they can edit them into shape, and if they self-deleted, then undelete them.

We need to help and encourage them to do the work to improve. Punishment is only useful when it causes the user to change their behavior, and is just frustration when they have no way of fixing the problems of the past (which since banning doesn't time out is all they can do to get unbanned). We've seen hundreds of posts from well-meaning users who don't understand our policies or just have trouble with the English language. This feature request will go a long way towards enabling them to work their way out once they've learned what they need to do.

Answer 8

We've been slowly moving towards completing this request over the years and have made incremental improvements to allow users to see content of their own that was deleted. The TL;DR here is that we have updated (as of 2022-01-12) the recently deleted questions/answers pages to show all deleted questions and answers.

Additional changes:

• The word "recently" has been removed from all references to these pages, including URLs.
• The pages now show all of your deleted questions or answers. Paging included, when necessary.
• These pages can now be referenced by /users/deleted-answers/current and /users/deleted-questions/current (which will load the pages for the currently logged-in user).
• The Deleted Answers page has gotten a major facelift, and is now showing post summaries that are much more inline with our design framework than the old list (it is using a Stacks post-summary, including answer score, question title, tags, last action date, and answer excerpt).

How we got here

In 2013, we created pages that allowed users to see their questions and answers that had been deleted, as long as they had been created within the last 60 days. My understanding is that 60 day time frame may have been intended to coincide with the age a higher-scoring post must be for the poster to keep the reputation earned, when it was deleted. So, essentially, it would show you why you might have lost a bunch of reputation due to a question or answer being deleted.

While I think this was a good first step towards something that Jeff Atwood was so much against due to fears of people using this information to complain about their content being deleted, it was often confusing because people didn't always understand the subtlety of the difference between "deleted recent posts" and "recently deleted posts". So, in February of 2020, we changed the page to show all posts that had been deleted in the last 60 days, regardless of their age.

This request had been in place since shortly after the page's original release in 2013 and we thought it made a lot of sense. Because we don't notify users when their posts are deleted, it can lead to some confusion about where it went - at least by retaining it on the list for 60 days, the authors could find the post if they looked for it soon after the deletion occurred.

One thing (anecdotally) that didn't happen, as far as I'm aware - a huge uptick in people complaining about their questions and answers being deleted. While these pages are somewhat obscured, users who are directed to them or find the pages either through a FAQ or other meta post don't necessarily complain about it on meta or inundate moderators with flags requesting undeletion or complaining about the post being deleted.

I understand that it can be frustrating to have something you write deleted - but I think the frustration can almost be greater when you can't find it to even gain some understanding of why it might have been deleted. Did the system delete it due to inactivity/closure (roomba)? Was it deleted by community members for being low quality or not an answer? It's easier to figure that out if you can find the post and review any comments on it.

There is one thing I see frequently on MSO in particular - people who are question banned struggling to understand why they can't ask questions. Many of them have forgotten that 2 or 5 year-old question they asked that was closed and deleted - which is understandable! By hiding this information, we rely on moderators and meta users more to find the deleted content and give the users links to it - which is a somewhat manual process.

Since we made the change to show all recently deleted posts nearly two years ago, I've been thinking about why we can't show all of the deleted posts and it seems like some of y'all have, too. When I mentioned in a chat room recently, the response I got was pretty immediate that it was still something that was in demand, even for people who have >10k rep and can easily find their own deleted questions.

Our goals

So, I asked about it internally - would it be difficult to do? From a Trust & Safety mentality, would it be harmful to show people these questions and answers? And this is what we came up with.

1. We want to keep the deleted content obscure because we do want people to be able to forget about/not be constantly confronted with their deleted content. As such, we will be implementing this by simply removing the 60 day limit and renaming the recently deleted questions/answers rather than adding deleted content to a user's list of questions and answers directly. We're also going to keep the deleted:1 search function as a high-rep user perk.
2. We want to help users who have deleted content, particularly those who are question or answer banned, see the content that may have gotten them there. Even if there's no way to fix it, being able to see the content means they may be able to review it and understand why it was deleted by reading comments or post notices or by seeing any edits that might have been made to the post... and then hopefully not make the same mistakes again.
3. We want to make it easier on community members and moderators who want to help - right now, it requires manually finding content and linking the users to the posts directly, which can be somewhat time consuming. By making this page show deleted questions or answers all-time, all that's necessary is to give the person a link to the page so they can find it. No digging required (and thanks to Makyen for the great suggestion to make a /current URL resolve as it does in other places).

Some possible risks

While we feel like this is a low-risk change, there are some potentially problematic edge cases.

• We could see an increase in people asking about their deleted posts on metas. If we get reports of this and it's rising to a level of being problematic, we will investigate.
• It's possible that moderators could get more flags from users with deleted posts asking for them to be undeleted. While our initial plans don't include any sort of limitations on flagging deleted content, if mods reach out to say that they're getting people re-flagging stuff they've been declining flags on, we'll consider it. That said, mods can leave comments on deleted posts that will notify the user as normal, so they can easily leave a comment explaining the flag decline or guide the user on how to improve the post.

The timeline

We're at the end of 2021 right now and are wrapping up for the year, so while I'm talking about this now, we won't be making the changes until January 2022. While the central change is relatively small, there's a handful of other strings to pull to make sure that this change is visible in other places, such as adding links to the question and answer ban help pages. I'll be back with an update once things are shipped. Thank you all for your patience but it feels great to be able to work towards a change that means so much to the community.

Answer 9

We are a community of learners. And we work on trusting that basically people are OK.

So.... suppose I ask a lousy question, and then I go outside and break my arms (karma). In the meantime BrainyMeg comments about why my question was lousy. Maybe, I dunno, about two chunky comments. My arm is still broken.

Then after I heal and can type, and log back into Stack Overflow and check my question link (which I had emailed to myself), I see... nothing - just a "OOPS. This question got deleted."

But an expert tried to tell me something, and it's... gone? For lack of... what?

Also, maybe I just spent an hour typing this, and want the original one to fix. It would be painful to retype the whole question.

Having the question closed is already a punishment to bad questions. Deleting the question only adds extra pain.

I think the functionality to view the bad-deleted-question may be granted alongside the ability to vote. It's an early right, but it should be earned just to reach a compromise with Jeff & co ;) i.e. so that the feature is not abused.

Now, if a question is egregious, that's a different story and mods can do the disappearing deal.

So, overall, it's just greater transparency, which translates to a better user experience.

Answer 10

It would be helpful to see at least the closed questions that I have asked, so that as I get more experience, I can look at the questions, see if I understand why they were closed, and get better at writing questions, based on my past failures.

At the moment it is hard to learn from the experience, so we just keep repeating the same mistakes.

Answer 11

I also find it very irritating that my answers vanish into the great void even if I invested some amount time to write the answer and it may apply to someone else who searches for a similar problem. (The time to answer the deleted question is now lost as well ...)

Just because the question is bad (and gets removed) doesn't mean the answers are bad as well. There is no direct correlation between question and answer scoring.

If I had access to my deleted answer (with less than 10k rep), I'd write a valid question to the answer and move the answer to this question just to preserve the answer (and it was upvoted several times before the question got deleted ...), but there is no way, because the answer is lost (even for myself).

The same may be applicable to deleted questions as well. Sometimes a part of the question was valid, but doesn't fit to the title, so it would make sense to split the question into two. Because the other part of the question was deemed inappropriate, there is no reason to forever remove the useful part.

Just my two cents.

Answer 12

This would have several pros, not least of which is that users can still read comment responses to questions that have been prematurely deleted. A good tie in would be the ability to edit their deleted questions, so that they can fix any problems before they flag for a moderator to undelete them.

Currently, the only counter argument to this feature request is:

it would lead to unbelievable amounts of whining.

Well, first of all, it has already lead to unbelievable amounts of whining. Take a look at the sheer quantity of answers here disagreeing with the rejection of the request.

Secondly, since when has the prospect of "whining" ever been a deciding factor in evaluating policies for the maintenance of the site? Everything from post bans to deletion of old off topic questions causes "whining".

I realise there may be a great many valid arguments against this feature request. This answer indicates that something similar was attempted before, and led to poor results (although that refers to showing all deleted content to all users, which is a huge difference of scale). One hiccup I can think of is that it might cause an upsurge in groundless flags for undeletion (i.e. everyone who has a question deleted immediately presses the flag button).

All I'm asking for is a re-evaluation of this request, or failing that a less nonsensical rationale for declining it.

Answer 13

Although this answer may simply be agreement with the other answers here, it seems the community's voice is not loud enough on this issue so hopefully this can expose the problem a little more. This is largely a repost of my own duplicated feature request, which has a slightly different motive than the original request in this post.

I typically vote to delete many closed questions immediately (following the PHP tag, there are many bad ones). However, sometimes I withhold the delete vote because there is a solution to the OP's problem in the comments and I want them to see it. Usually something like the resolution to a trivial parse error or typo. Often the question is deleted quickly but it's apparent that the author hasn't seen any of his replies.

This seems like a bad reason to not delete something that deserves removal, but I want them to get their "answer" (because I am a nice guy) and I don't want them to try re-asking the question. I assume they can't access their post after it's deleted, and it affects my behavior moderating the site.

I'm talking mainly about unsalvagable posts, ones that are solved by fixing a trivial parse error or typo, that cannot be possibly edited into something useful or be relevant to anybody except the author.

The fact that users can't see their own deleted questions has the following effects on overall question quality:

• It affects my moderation behavior (and others I've talked to) by causing me to withhold delete votes, which means more should-be-deleted posts in search results and the "Related" sidebar.
• It can lead to duplicate questions, since the OP has no clue what happened
• It does not help the author understand what they did wrong, and what can be done to prevent it in the future (so, more low quality questions). How is the author expected to learn from the mistake?

There should at least be a warning, or inbox notification when your own question is deleted, especially when it's an active question posted only minutes ago. Even allowing a limited view of the post would be a big improvement (maybe only allow viewing for a certain amount of time, not forever).

Consider this:

I've just stumbled across this poorly worded question - if you look through the comments it appears that the user previously asked an identical question that was deleted - it occurred to me that this question may well have been deleted before the poster had a chance to read any of the comments / feedback on that question, and may not have even realised that his question was deleted (hence the identical repost).

I believe this topic should be revisited, just look at the support in this thread - it's ridiculous.

Answer 14

When MSO gets loads of bug reports, duplicates are eliminated rather fast. This provokes questions from the OP about what happened to their questions (recent example).

Notifications are a way of informing users that this has happened. If the notification system is not used, the OP should at least be able to see his own deleted questions.

I've added this answer to this proposal to show my support for it (and to bump it to front page once again). The team should reconsider this status-declined.

Answer 15

A new user is not very aware of phrasing a question into relevant quotes and often violates format regulations in the phrasing of questions, as I indeed did in my initial stages.

In that case, the experienced users either downvotes or ask for deletion of the offending question, which could result in some of these consequences:

1. It will discourage the new user.
2. Users will not be able to check for the mistakes they made in the questions once they are deleted.

Pros for keeping deleted questions in the profile are:

1. It will allow them to edit it into shape, so they can work towards getting unbanned.
2. It will help the new user, not to make the same mistake twice.
3. Encourages them to ask relevant questions in the community.
4. Suggestions and discussions on the deleted questions could be preserved.

Cons for keeping deleted questions in the profile are:

1. Once the user gets reputed, downvoted and closed questions might reflect a bad impression on the experienced profile (though since only he can see it, this might not apply).

I believe that it's a good idea to keep the deleted questions along with regular questions in the user profile.

Answer 16

I would like to see a sandbox mode for deleted posts.

To the post's author, mods and (perhaps) 10k or 20k users, deleted posts would behave (for the most part) in the exact same manner as non-deleted questions, allowing editing, flagging, etc. The exception would be voting, which would need to be disallowed. For all other users, the post would effectively cease to exist. A combination of styling and annotations would serve to ensure that everyone able to view it is aware the post is not visible to the site in general.

Using this approach, people who have had their posts deleted (automatically or by a mod) or who deleted their post and later regretted it would be able to improve their post, should they be willing to spend the time/effort to do so. A flag could then be used to request undeletion from a mod. Other concerned users (with over 10k rep) might also be able to do so, although I admit I can't see that being much of a use-case.

For reasons outlined in other answers, this would allow users who genuinely want to make an effort and learn how to write a good post, or who are willing to do what it takes to overturn a question ban, to helpfully contribute to the site. By allowing edits to be made before the post is undeleted, it ensures only good content is displayed on the site, and reduces mod workload.

Finally, I don't see this being a particularly difficult approach to implement:

• Deleted questions are already hidden from users under 10k. All that needs changing in this respect is that they should also be visible to the original author. This is already the case for answers.
• The requisite styling and annotations are already in place on deleted questions.
• Editing, flagging, etc would need to be enabled for the author, mods and 10k/20k on deleted questions and answers. Given that there's already checks for such things for non-deleted questions (enabling direct-edit for 2k users, for example), I imagine this would only require some adjustments to those checks.
• Voting is already disabled on locked questions. This would require extending that to locked or deleted questions and answers.

Answer 17

This request was made in 2009. Times are different now in some regards. More and more companies realize that respect for user data is good business, and offer export options. Google, for instance, has Google Vault,

an add-on for Google Apps that lets you retain, archive, search, and export your organization's email and chat messages

and also Takeout, which lets you

Create an archive with your data from Google products.

Can StackExchange show similar respect for users' data, and allow access to all content they have posted, included deleted questions, regardless of reputation?

Answer 18

I'll describe my personal experience from today. I've come up to this question and recalled that once I posed a question with a summary of some equivalent definitions of continuity that might be of interest to the OP. However, I couldn't find it in my history. I even started to doubt my memory. Later I went through two years of my paper notes to find approximately when I considered this matter – it was the end of August 2018. Then I looked to the history of my activity around that time and found only the Tumbleweed badge I received – I recalled that I received it for the question. Only in the badge award decription I could find a link to my question – only then I learnt that the question was automatically deleted after a year and that there even is such a thing as automatic deletion. I wonder, are there some more posts of mine that were deleted?

• It's nice that it is possible search for your deleted posts with ≥10k rep, but I have only 7k. I think the threshold should be lowered, ideally to something like 1k.
• It's very bad that I got no notification about the deletion. I've checked my inbox and nothing related to deletion is there.
• I would also like to see the full history of my activities unaltered by removal of events related to deleted posts.

Answer 19

I don't like this idea: I want my user profile to look the same, or nearly the same to me as it does to everyone else.

But searching for my deleted posts is a different matter...

Answer 20

Just so it stands out a bit, Nick Craver (employee of Stack Exchange) commented to another question in March 2012:

show people deleted questions before having high rep has ended in quite a mess in the past, I don't think we'll repeat that anytime soon

Answer 21

I believe it is deleted to conserve space on the server, however, I would be nice if a .pdf file or something were compiled and sent to your registered email account. This way everybody would win. The servers aren't cluttered and everybody would have their answers.

Answer 22

I will conject one possible reason, at the risk of violating the absence of discussion, why this has been declined.

My example:
I recently asked a question which was closed and promptly deleted. It received few views and no votes in the 5 hours for which it was open. (FYI, it has 15 views at time of writing, and 4 of those are mine.) Although the question would've been deleted by the bot in its closed condition anyway, that doesn't explain why it was closed initially.

Perhaps it is because Stack Exchange doesn't want users with less than a certain level of involvement to see the question?
I can only suppose that it violated some taboo, unknown to me, and that the mod who deleted it would rather that it disappear quietly.
Was there some concern that I, or others like me, would pursue a vendetta if the rejection of my question were made more visible by allowing it to remain visible and votable?

Perhaps. I can only say, from where I'm standing, that Stack Exchange admins probably want the ability to hide certain questions from the unindoctrinated viewers or users, and would rather that such a thing be itself hidden. The best way to hide it would be to cloak it in the broader facility that is deletion.
If this factual, then of course the people who want such functionality don't want it to be popular knowledge; such furtiveness is at the very least internally consistent.

Of course, like all puted conspiracies, it would be difficult for me to demonstrate that such a thing is factual. Human psychology allows for the likelyhood; from where I stand, that's all I know.

Answer 23

I've had my questions deleted, and yes, It's annoying. But your question will most likely be deleted for one or more of the following reasons:

• It's been inactive for too long

• It's spammy or innapropriate

• It's unanswerable

• It's received a certain number of downvotes, and was automatically removed.

Like a couple of other answers state above, it would be nice if a .pdf could be sent to you, but unless you have 10,000 reputation or more, you cannot access deleted questions. In hopes of an update that allows you to view removed questions, there's nothing we can do.

Answer 24

Generally when things get deleted, it's for a good reason, and we don't want users to be undeleting them -- there's a reason we require 10k rep to "see" deleted items at all, and only moderators can see deletions in a user's profile.