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I'm a moderator on Amateur Radio. I recently was surprised to find a question I had ‘helped with’ vanish without a trace from the site (including any references to my actions on it). Now, of course, questions can be deleted, but deletions are of interest to moderators, right?

As part of my search, I found the /admin/recently-self-deleted page and went there. The question was not listed even though, afterward, I determined that it had been self-deleted (at the time) two hours ago. It is now days since the deletion and the question is still not showing up, even though other questions have. This seems like a bug.

For any moderators/SE staff wishing to investigate: this is the question and here's the page not showing it.

The question has no votes, no answers, and was deleted one day after it was posted.

A similar problem has been reported on another site.

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  • If you click on the question link, does it give a 404 page or can you see the deleted question?
    – wythagoras
    Feb 14, 2016 at 16:17
  • @wythagoras I can see the deleted question.
    – Kevin Reid
    Feb 14, 2016 at 16:18
  • Then it is indeed very weird. If you couldn't see the deleted question, it could be a hard-deleted question, i.e. a question that was removed form the database.
    – wythagoras
    Feb 14, 2016 at 16:27
  • Are those posts present now, or have we encountered the same bug?
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Feb 24, 2016 at 21:21
  • @Gilles I just checked back, and more recently deleted posts have shown up but that particular one has not. Updated.
    – Kevin Reid
    Feb 25, 2016 at 2:07
  • @Gilles Your edit went too far. The question on my site is not answered.
    – Kevin Reid
    Feb 25, 2016 at 15:56
  • @Kevin does the self deleted question have any answers? If so, you should keep the previous title, since the bug is specific to questions with answers
    – Shadow Wizard Is Sad And Angry
    Feb 25, 2016 at 16:02
  • @ShadowWizard It has zero answers, I meant.
    – Kevin Reid
    Feb 25, 2016 at 16:03
  • hmm... and what is the question score? /cc @Gilles
    – Shadow Wizard Is Sad And Angry
    Feb 25, 2016 at 16:07
  • @ShadowWizard Updated.
    – Kevin Reid
    Feb 25, 2016 at 16:41
  • @KevinReid Oh, sorry, I'd understood “helped with” to mean “answered”. So it still may or may not be the same bug.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Feb 25, 2016 at 17:14
  • @ShadowWizard For the three examples I listed in meta.stackexchange.com/questions/276108/…, the question scores are -1 (+1/-2), 1 (+1/0) and 0 (0/0). The answer scores are always 0 (0/0).
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Feb 25, 2016 at 17:16
  • @Gilles weird, let's hope the team will figure this out...
    – Shadow Wizard Is Sad And Angry
    Feb 25, 2016 at 17:39

1 Answer 1

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Apparently there's a requirement that posts must be visible on the site for more than a day in order to show up in that list.

This sort of makes sense in that showing every post that was created mistakenly and immediately removed would just noisy up the list...

...But a day is kind of a long time for a post to be visible on most sites. Not to mention confusing for folks like you when, after seeing and working on such a post, it disappears without a trace.

I'd recommend reducing this restriction to something small like 10 minutes, or dropping it entirely.

2019-02-04: After failing to find any documented reason for this, I've dropped the restriction entirely; this list should now contain the last 1000 author-deleted posts. Also fixed an unrelated bug wherein posts would previously be included if they'd ever been self-deleted, even if they were later undeleted and then deleted again by someone else.

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  • I've just come across this myself and can think of at least 3-4 posts in the last weekend that fail to show up on the recently self deleted for this reason. This needs to be implemented please!
    – Catija
    Oct 23, 2017 at 15:28
  • This is still a problem. Any estimate on when it's going to be fixed? 6–8 years? 6–8 decades? 6–8 aeons? Or even better, remove this misfeature of allowing question deletion when there is an answer?
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Feb 1, 2019 at 12:01
  • Today, @Gilles.
    – Shog9
    Feb 4, 2019 at 16:50
  • Thank you! It's still far from ideal, because there's no way to filter it, but at least now the posts do show up, so it's “just” a matter of finding the ones we want (in my case, usually, what I'm looking for is the answered ones).
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Feb 4, 2019 at 17:17
  • Something like is:question deleted:1 answers:1 isanswered:0 closed:0 probably gets closer to what you want then, @Gilles
    – Shog9
    Feb 4, 2019 at 17:52
  • Thank you! This is indeed a lot more useful.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Feb 4, 2019 at 21:53

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