The justification for keeping https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/73455/popular-deleted-stack-overflow-and-programmers-questions on Meta.SE is:
So those two Programmers questions are the only justification for keeping this on Meta instead of SO meta or Programmers meta alone – random Jul 6 at 18:37
@random, I pulled my account on Programmers a long time ago, after they changed the original intent and there was no way to figure out what was OT. I'm hoping someone (with the 10k rep to see them) who frequents Programmers will update it; in fact, I'm hoping they create the one on Programmers, so I can stop maintaining both this one and the one on MSO. Please note that I didn't create the question, and wouldn't have done it that way. – Lance Roberts Jul 24 at 19:14
On that list is are two questions from the elder days of P.SE:
- What real life bad habits has programming given you
- What's your favorite "programmer ignorance" pet peeve?
These questions are ones that were migrated from Stack Overflow at some point when the site was Not Programming Related (NPR).
That site didn't work. It wasn't that site for long (a whopping 29 days). After that initial burst of activity of everyone adding their own favorite cartoon or quote from Sneekers, the site fizzled. There really aren't any great, keep worthy popular questions from the period after that haven't been historically locked.
As with any site, people come and go. Most of the active people on the site started well after December 16th 2010. To us, these questions represent some other site that just happens to be preserved with pink backgrounds or a historical lock and something people talk about in chat... like what to name a cat or if Jon Skeet should be a patron saint of programmers. Seriously.
Without the help of mods to go dig through or combing the favorites of users as a 10k user to see what pink backgrounded oddities sit there, the list of 'popular programmers not programming related deleted questions' will never get past those two links. And they're really not good.
The people from the NPR days weren't interested in being active on MSO. And many that were around back then and still are reasonably active aren't active on MSE.
We're really not interested in keeping our toe nail clippings in a jar. Non one really has the desire to create a road side museum in M.P.SE. And I'm glad that's the case. We've tried preserving some questions that might have some semblance of importance and if people want to do that, they can contact the mods who be happy to dig up old questions for them.
That said, lets just get rid of those two items and boot the list off of MSE so that it can remain only on MSO for those who enjoy it there.
