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When I visit Meta Stack Overflow, some of the questions on the page are red boxed. From my understanding, that means the question was deleted. Perplexed as I don't have 10,000 rep on Stack Overflow or here, I tapped it and was shown the deleted question page.

I experienced this a month ago, but didn't say anything as tapping the link, going back (using cache), then refreshing removes the link. I have never experienced this on the desktop site.

For the question itself, here it is: "Fibonacci numbers with parent thread and child thread [closed]"

Here is a screenshot of the home page with the link:

Here is a screenshot of what happens after tapping the link:

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  • How long does the question stay there? What happens if you refresh? – David Robinson Apr 15 '13 at 17:25
  • As I said: refreshing doesn't fix it, but if it tap the link, tap back, the cache will load it, then I tap refresh and it fixes it. – Cole Johnson Apr 15 '13 at 17:27
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    Why the heck do you have 61 tabs open on your iPhone? – Richard J. Ross III Apr 15 '13 at 18:13
  • Interestingly: some (nondeleted) questions have yellow backgrounds – Cole Johnson May 2 '13 at 15:55
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    Holy mother of tabs. – It'sNotALie. May 2 '13 at 16:07
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    What's with the custom bounty text? – Lix May 2 '13 at 16:13
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    @Lix I believe it is people rebelling against the bounty message limit. – Richard J. Ross III May 2 '13 at 16:47
  • @ric - oh right... there was a double alanis tribute the other day... – Lix May 2 '13 at 16:47
  • @Lix actually... – Cole Johnson May 2 '13 at 16:59
  • @Sklivvz So status-declined, but no reasoning? Was this fixed without trying and now you can't reproduce it? – Cole Johnson May 14 '14 at 16:55
  • @ColeJohnson the issue is well described in the accepted answer - it's a caching problem. – Sklivvz May 14 '14 at 16:56
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+100

About your "non deleted questions have yellow background":

There are 3 types of backgrounds:

  • Yellow: questions with favorited tags in it.
  • Red-ish: a freshly deleted question (but that is still cached on the homepage)
  • White: any other question

About the red-ish question:

The problem is mostly that a question got deleted closely at the same moment you loaded the page (and is still cached in the page you see). I've gotten this problem a few times both on desktop site and mobile site. It's easier to see the same phenomenon on the meta site since there are a lot less question getting on the main page (and thus questions that get deleted have more chance to be visible).

Normally the problem goes away when you refresh the page. Therefore I don't think this is likely to get fixed (even though I agree this is kind of annoying when encountered)!

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  • While yes, all the information in your answer is accurate, I disagree that it shouldn't be fixed. It creates a bad UX to have a link that 404's after you click it. – Richard J. Ross III May 7 '13 at 14:31
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    @Richard I didn't say I don't want it to get fixed. I said I don't think it'll get fixed – Hugo Dozois May 7 '13 at 14:32
  • @ColeJohnson downvotes show disagreement on meta, very little more. I can downvote as I please, thank you. – Richard J. Ross III May 7 '13 at 18:34

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