When a user has one of their questions or answers deleted, why don't you notify them about the deletion, and send the removed content by email? [duplicate]

Question

Some questions or answers can take a while to write. For example, I had written a question on http://productivity.stackexchange.com, and one day it got silently deleted, meaning I cannot access it any more (luckily I had a backup, without all the links that used to be though).

Why don't you notify the author about the deletion, and send the removed content by email? I find that removing content and leaving no access to it without warning is highly disrespectful to the people who took the time to write it.

Here is the question I had asked that got removed. As you can see, it would have been painful for me to re-write the whole question if I hadn't saved it:

Question: Are there any recent results on the performances of head tracking devices used to move the mouse cursor in comparison with traditional mice? (e.g. using Fitts's law)

Question's details: As I use a head tracking device to move the mouse cursor for efficiency purpose, I was curious to know whether the Fitts's law can be applied to it (i.e. is not restricted to hands). Fitts's law says "Fitts' law has been shown to apply under a variety of conditions, with many different limbs (hands, feet, head-mounted sights, eye gaze)". The wiki entry has some interesting references:

Errol R., Hoffmann (1991) "A comparison of hand and foot movement times". Ergonomics, Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 397-406 >A comparison of hand and foot movement times. (foot vs hand results are clearly presented)

So, R. H. Y. and Griffin, M. J. (2000) "Effects of target movement direction cue on head-tracking performance". Ergonomics, Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 360–376. >Effects of a target movement direction cue on hea... [Ergonomics. 2000] (head moves aren't used to move a cursor)

So, R. H. Y. and Cheung, K. M., (2002) "Combined and interacting effects of hand and head movement lags on discrete manual performance in a virtual environment." Ergonomics, 45, 2002, pp. 105–123. > http://www-ieem.ust.hk/dfaculty/so/pdf/So+Chung-2002-ergonomics.pdf (head moves aren't used to move a cursor)

So, R. H. Y., Cheung, K. M. and Goonetilleke, R. S. (1999) "Target-directed head movements in a head-coupled virtual environment: predicting the effects of lags using Fitts' law". Human Factors, Vol. 41, No. 3, 1999, pp. 474–486. > Target-directed head movements in a head-coupled... [Hum Factors. 1999] (head moves are used to move a cursor but a lag is introduced and there is no direct comparison with hands. Also I don't have access to the full article.)

I skimmed through them but it seems like none of them address the performances of a head tracking device to move the mouse cursor. Furthermore they are pretty old and I don't know to what extent those results can be extended for hands-free mouse performances. Lastly for whatever reason most of them seem to focus on lag / delay. Are there any recent results on the performances of head tracking devices used to move the mouse cursor in comparison with traditional mice?

The best I have found so far is Ashdown, Mark, Kenji Oka, and Yoichi Sato. "Combining head tracking and mouse input for a GUI on multiple monitors." CHI'05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, 2005. Combining head tracking and mouse input for a GUI on multiple monitors, but results seem preliminary, don't use Fitts's law, and anyway just use head tracking to switch between different monitors.

I'm also interested in eye tracking as a mouse and foot mice performances (Errol R., Hoffmann (1991) gives hints for the latter). Ideally I would like to have table comparing all these ways to control the mouse ( hand / head / foot / eye).

Answer 1

Our aversion to showing users their deleted content is just as by-design as you've probably noticed; the vast majority of posts that get deleted don't have very much lasting intrinsic value. You might immediately disagree with me, and that's fine, but I'm speaking to posts as a whole across the network.

The problem that I have with notifying users of content they've contributed being deleted is that it's not generally an actionable notification. As you said, the only thing that you could really do is just pull a copy of it if you didn't have one, and there was something in the content that you didn't want to lose. Sure, there may be cases where the community or a moderator made a mistake, but those are very much in the minority.

If we take notifications out of the equation, what we're left with is how easy it is for folks to discover and access their own deleted content during the course of finding that thing that they wrote in an answer to that question a few months ago. We have that solved to a certain extent, you can see your deleted recent questions and answers from your profile page if you click on your question or answer summary. But, this is not quite ideal when the content falls out of the realm of recent. Additionally, I could simply say keep a copy of anything you feel is important, but you don't always know what's important until a unique need arises. I am not without sympathy, I too was a user with less than 10k rep and no diamond for quite a long time.

I think the solution isn't a notification and an email, while that would satisfy the immediate scenario, it presents a number of problems. How do we differentiate mail-worthy content from spam? Votes aren't a reliable indicator, flags aren't a reliable indicator and that crucial bit of information you wanted might be in a zero-scored post.

I think the solution here is a better means of discovering deleted content that you own when you realize that it's no longer there, and without having deleted posts clutter up your profile. Perhaps letting you use a special search modifier might be the answer, and that might be something to explore.

However, as written - I don't think this would work. I'm not, however, saying that the problem you're addressing is without merit.

Answer 2

Currently it is handled this way:

• If you lose reputation because a post was deleted, you get a notification^[1] of this lost reputation. Without a link.
• In your profile is a link to your recently deleted posts.
• You can see your own deleted content regardless of reputation.

There are only a few options on how to notify the user:

• Via mail: Too high bounce rate. Don't do that.
• Via Global Inbox: The global inbox should only notify about "positive" events, and a "we deleted one of your posts" is not.

I expect status-declined here and on the duplicate.

^{1. In your recent reputation change of this site or your global reputation change on Meta Stack Overflow.}

Answer 3

In general Stackexchange has no interest in making the people who write content that has to be deleted feel respected.

If you sent them the whole text of the question the might repost the same text.

As far as having an archive on the post that you write online, it's your own problem if you don't have a way to archive them.