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I was about to flag a question as a duplicate because there is a question with a well written answer that I often answer that I often reference covering the same topic. However when I went to the question I found that the answer was deleted by the moderator Andrew Barber on Dec 23.

Direct link to the answer in question: How do I create a self-signed certificate for code signing on Windows?

Why was this answer deleted by a moderator? I don't see anything really wrong with it and it was a very good answer with 121 upvotes. The only thing I can think of is it was done on accident.

I would just vote to undelete the post but normal users can't vote to undelete moderator deleted posts.

Image of the deletion. the post is very long and would be too long to post here.
enter image description here

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  • 2
    Holy Cow, I can't believe that was deleted. Please flag for moderator to check it out. – Lance Roberts Jan 8 '14 at 23:14
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    Could you post a picture for us <10K please? – scrblnrd3 Jan 8 '14 at 23:15
  • Looks like it might be. Perhaps Andrew will explain his reasoning. – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Jan 8 '14 at 23:16
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    All of the links in the answer are dead. Well, actually, just the first three ones. The Microsoft ones are OK. – user102937 Jan 8 '14 at 23:18
  • @RobertHarvey Ah...dead links. That makes sense. Presumably, finding the appropriate replacement links would be enough to get it un-deleted, no? – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Jan 8 '14 at 23:20
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    Actually, just the first link is dead. Some of the links are still good, but out of date. – user102937 Jan 8 '14 at 23:23
  • @RobertHarvey I don't think the links are dead, they are just not web links (yes I know the choice of using http:\\ for the timestamp url is a bad choice but yell at the people who invented certificate timestamping). The first one just ignores HTTP requests that are not formed correctly to the API, the 2nd redirects you to the main page and the 3rd gives a friendly landing page telling you how to use it. – Scott Chamberlain Jan 8 '14 at 23:24
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    Quite right. Anyway, that's what the flag that was cast said... broken links. – user102937 Jan 8 '14 at 23:26
  • Out of curiosity, is it standard for answers to be deleted just for broken links? I mean, even without the links(added over 3 years after the answer was given, by someone else), it's a good answer. Is it just a broken window thing? Wouldn't a simple comment to the still-active-answerer (or edit to remove links) be a better first step? – Geobits Jan 9 '14 at 2:49
  • No, it's not standard @Geobits. This was most probably a mistake. It happens... – yannis Jan 9 '14 at 2:50
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    @Yannis I didn't think it was. The question here asked if it was a mistake, but from Robert's comments, I wasn't so sure. It sounded almost like, "Well, the links were bad, so...", and I wanted to make sure I had it right in my head. – Geobits Jan 9 '14 at 2:53
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    I just edited the answer to de-linkify the timestamp URLs, since there's very little point in trying to open them in a browser. – Ilmari Karonen Jan 9 '14 at 10:49
  • Note that although this is now status-completed, we still need confirmation whether bad links alone are enough to delete. – Mark Hurd Jan 10 '14 at 13:05

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