So here's a question I ought to know the answer to by now: I'm trying to find a post I commented on yesterday, but the comment is not showing up on my "activity" page. I guess that means the question has since been deleted (it was already closed when I commented), but I also can't find it among the recently deleted questions.

The question asked why lim_{x --> oo} 1/x is 0 rather than an infinitesimal.

I left a comment talking about how you could define things this way if you liked, but you wouldn't get a well-defined number system.

I thought the title contained both the words "infinite" and "infinitesimal", but I'm not sure of anything anymore :)

Am I correct in thinking that if the comment doesn't appear in my activity page, it ought to be because the post was deleted?

@TimCampion When you say that you're searching among "recently deleted questions", do you mean the search using deleted:1 which is available to the mods?

@MartinSleziak Ah, nope!

Or do you mean the moderator tools available to 10k+ users? This one does not contain self-deletion.

It's the first one on the former list

I was using the moderator tools

There are things which can be done by regular users to find deleted questions (such as mod tools, SEDE, some other tricks), but searching for deleted questions is much more difficult for regular users. Since you have the diamond, you have an easier way to do this.

wow, Martin, it bears repeating, you know more about the site than just about anybody here. Thanks!

For regular users, the search using deleted:1 only returns their own posts, and this is only available to 10k+ users.

for reference, it was this question

Mathematics Meta: Is there any way to see my deleted questions or answers?

@TimCampion I could cite Glorfindel and quid as counterexamples. (And most likely many other users, but in those two are among users I have run into.)

it's a short list!

In any case, I have spent some time searching for deleted posts on Mathematics on several occasions. (On that site I have above 10k reputation points.) So it's natural that I have some stuff about searching for such posts.

Interesting though, the question seems to indicate that it was not self-deleted.

It lists people who deleted it

Maybe they had voted to delete it when it was self-deleted or something

Hm, I thought that in such case it should be shown in the list of recently deleted question in the mod tools.

I cannot check this for myself on MO.

Oh I see

It's one and the same deleted question list

I was just being silly and forgetting to sort the list by "new"

Somehow the link you gave had it properly sorted

So it's the same page to find deleted questions for moderators and non-moderators, just apparently populated differently for the two.

Yes, exactly as you write.

When using the option "deleted:1", the mods should have ability to search among all deleted post, 10k+ users get search among their own deleted post and for users with lower reputation, the option is simply ignored and they get all questions. (I have tried the latter two on various sites, but you confirmed that it works for the moderators as expected.)

Yes, looking further down the list I'm seeing some self-deletions

The reason I was looking for this post is that it occurred to me it's a classic example of a post being downvoted, closed, and deleted not because it's a bad question, but because the question betrays some naivete on the part of the user.

And in this case it's a good question for a researcher to ask.

So it illustrates a confusion in the term "research-level" somehow.

It seems to me that ideally we'd already have a canonical answer to a question like this on the site, and close it as a duplicate.

Because the way it was closed sends the message that it's a bad question, or that the questioner is a bad mathematician for asking it, which I think is wrong.

But I'm loathe to unilaterally reopen this question because I'm not sure I'm quite ready to die on this hill.

Being below 10k, I do not have access to the question. May I ask whether the OP has also an account on Mathematics? Maybe they went to ask there after the question was closed and deleted on MathOverflow.

They don't seem to have a math.se account

Thanks for the response!