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I asked a question on stackoverflow and received 2 answers. One of the answers provided was not applicable to the situation, and the other one was a good answer.

The poster who provided me a good answer made a comment in his answer saying that the code he posted was just the bare essentials as the rest of the code had come from a proprietary solution that he did not have permission to post the entirety of.

After he made that comment about his answer, some overly zealous community member jumped on his back saying that he shouldn't have posted proprietary code in the first place. The code sample in question had been generalized and contained a few lines of code that can be found all over the internet.

None the less the answer was removed. I had already seen it, and had done further research regarding this specific answer, and ultimately used a part of it to solve my problem.

I wanted to come back to the question and thank the guy, but then I discovered his answer was gone, so now I don't know how to mark my question answered.

What should I do? I would like to give credit where credit was due, or at least send a thank you to the guy. Also is there a way to find out who removed his answer? If it was done by the author then so be it, I can respect that totally. But I have a feeling this was a community moderation decision, and a bad one.

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    You can start by linking to the question. Deletions are almost always soft, i.e. posts can be undeleted. Moderators can check the deleted answer and take it from there...
    – yannis
    Jan 30, 2012 at 21:04
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    10k users can see who removed the post. I don't know whether it was due to the other users comment, but it was removed by the owner and not a moderator.
    – Brandon
    Jan 30, 2012 at 21:11
  • @Brandon I'm guessing the DV didn't help either
    – Some Helpful Commenter
    Jan 30, 2012 at 21:34
  • stackoverflow.com/a/8812411/445517 "deleted by owner Jan 13 at 5:25"
    – CodesInChaos
    Jan 30, 2012 at 21:58
  • The answer was up for over two days. You couldn't be bothered with upvoting or accepting the answer? Instead it was downvoted. So sure, it is gone now.
    – Uphill Luge
    Jan 31, 2012 at 1:52

1 Answer 1

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CodeInChaos included a link to the answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8812411/445517

It was deleted by the owner, StriplingWarrior. While "the community" could cast enough undelete votes to bring it back, I can't recall seeing a self-deleted answer ever brought back forcibly. Similarly, a moderator is unlikely to undelete this answer.

If you care enough about thanking him, feel free to find some of his other questions or answers (he has some good ones) and up vote something that looks deserving. (Don't go nuts, or the daily cleanup scripts might think its found some Bad Behavior and undo all the votes. One or two will suffice.)

In his comments, he included a link to https://stackoverflow.com/a/1159687/120955 -- which might also be useful to you.

In the meantime, post an answer to your own question with the code you're using, or a similarly stripped summary of the code you're using -- your question has six upvotes and one star, so there's obviously larger interest in the question.

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