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When I type an answer to a question, and other people answered it at the same time, I see a message on the top of the page indicating that other answers are available.
On the other hand, if the author removed his question during this time, there is no alert in the same way.

Today, I spent thirty minutes writing a very detailed answer to an interesting question. Then, when I posted it, a saw an error saying that this question was removed ten minutes ago. How sad!
To avoid such things, is it possible to be alerted not only about the newly posted answers, but also about two other events:

  • The case when the question was removed,
  • The case when the question was closed.

Edit: apparently, some users see those removed/closed notifications, when others don't. So it might be a bug which affects this type of alerts, without affecting the "new answers" notifications.

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    Not sure why so many votes, as these notifications already exist... of course, there could be a bug whereby you didn't see the banners (that wouldn't surprise me). For closed questions, there is an unlimited grace period for adding answers after the question is actually closed, but for deleted questions, obviously you can't add an answer after the question has been deleted.
    – Jon Seigel
    Commented Aug 9, 2010 at 0:04
  • Related and possible dupe: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/49306/…
    – user138231
    Commented Aug 9, 2010 at 0:51
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    @Jon Seigel: at least there were no notifications in my case (using FF 3.6.8). And I never had any problems with the new answers notifications.
    – Arseni Mourzenko
    Commented Aug 9, 2010 at 1:28
  • @Jon: Even the normal "new answer posted" banners are not very reliable. Quite often I'll work on an answer for 3-5 minutes and find when I posted that someone (or multiple someones) had already posted an answer 2-3 minutes ago, with no notification given. I've never seen question closed/deleted notifications, even though that's happened to me a couple times, too. All on recent versions of Firefox and Chrome on OS X (10.5 and then 10.6).
    – Nicholas Knight
    Commented Aug 9, 2010 at 3:23
  • I can confirm that there are a few cases where your not going to see a closed notification. Maybe it has something to do with the question being answered/closed or closed/answered by another user in a very short amount of time. But I wasted a bit of time on this one today stackoverflow.com/questions/5796986/hack-a-test-c-server/…
    – RandomNickName42
    Commented Apr 26, 2011 at 23:27

2 Answers 2

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This functionality already exists - the ajax callbacks happen every 45 seconds after you start typing an answer.

You will be notified if a question is closed or deleted.

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    well, I were not notified. So I suppose that something goes wrong with this feature.
    – Arseni Mourzenko
    Commented Aug 9, 2010 at 9:19
  • Btw, if there is something I can do to help figuring out what happened (by looking at AJAX requests etc.) or trying to reproduce the bug, I'm ready to give my mail address if need.
    – Arseni Mourzenko
    Commented Aug 9, 2010 at 9:35
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    @MainMa there was also a javascript bug around these notifications that was fixed a few days ago - so you were correct in your assertions that there was an issue. Thanks for the perseverance!
    – Jarrod Dixon
    Commented Aug 15, 2010 at 3:26
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It would also be useful to be notified if the question was edited or changed...great idea, +1

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    we don't do edit notifications, though, this would be a new request
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Aug 9, 2010 at 4:13

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