Discussion on answer by Mister Positive: Why was a HNQ deleted?

last day (15 days later) »

Feeds

13:20

-2

A: Why was a HNQ deleted?

I have un-deleted it, but left it closed. Let's see what happens to it now.

user226435

Thank you for answering the question. I'm not going to upvote, because votes here are clearly used as "I agree" not "this answer is useful" like other metas.

mxyzplk

I love getting rid of troll questions but I’m not sure why this is one, it doesn’t trip my troll senses (usually trolls go for the opposite “I am a conservative white man and someone discriminated against me” line.

NotThatGuy

I would say it's too specific to garner useful answers (for anyone else), but okay. Half of the answers are going on about how that specific comment is totally okay in their opinion. Putting aside the issue of whether any of us are really even in a position to be able to make that judgement (even if we had a lot more information), it's highly unlikely to help anyone with a similar problem.

It might be trolling, but I can probably find 100 former-HNQ questions that seem much more likely to be trolling and are still going strong (that list would probably consist of most of the HNQ questions if I'm being honest, including the other one currently there). Trolls like to have nice and juicy questions. Just referring to a single comment doesn't really give people a whole lot to get worked up about.

mxyzplk

This is something that happens to women in the workplace every day, a lot... Why does it meet your definition of trolling? What is unbelievable about it (besides the responses, sadly)?

Lilienthal

While I could argue whether it's likely a troll both ways, I'd say the highly opinion-based nature combined with the HNQ influx of poor answers that still get upvoted and the usual comment storm on a question like this all together can warrant a deletion. At the very least I would have closed it. If it had been caught before it hit HNQ and improved to clarify the question and downplay "was this over the line?" to instead focus on "what do I do when I feel someone went over the line?" it would have been a much more useful question.

Old_Lamplighter

13:20

@mxyzplk Funny, it never happened to my mom or my wife, or my ex wife, or any of my SOs.

Closing it would have been a better course of action. At least then it could have been edited.

mxyzplk

@Old_Lamplighter Consider taking as homework going and asking your mom, wife, ex-wife, and ex-SOs if they've ever had a man make comments about their appearance at work that made them uncomfortable. Just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it didn't happen. You may learn from doing this.

Joe Strazzere

While useful, this answer doesn't actually answer the question that was asked: "Why was the post deleted?"

user226435

@JoeStrazzere Please look at the first revision.

Old_Lamplighter

@mxyzplk feel free to ask my mom in person

gnat

looking at question timeline it is as if it was kept advertised at sidebar for quite a while even after closure and mod-removal from HNQ, did you by chance deleted to prevent off-site visitors landing on question that was not expected to be shown to them? This very meta question also makes it look like someone clicked the question listed at sidebar when it wasn't supposed to be there. Such questions sometimes (not often) stick in the sidebar due to caching, making it look like something is broken there, maybe you thought one needs to try harder to make it work as expected?

user226435

13:20

@gnat "This very meta question also makes it look like someone clicked the question listed at sidebar when it wasn't supposed to be there." No, I found the post the day before and when I went to read it the next day it was deleted.

gnat

@user119079 anyway, my main point is, sometimes these questions pop in sidebar long after expected removal from hot list. When this happens, it really feels like a bug and if I was a moderator I'd be heavily tempted to remove it, just to make things work. Luckily I'm not a mod so when I first saw this I merely considered posting bug report at meta (didn't do this back then because when preparing meta post I found that it was already asked and answered)

user226435

Please can you edit your answer to include rev1. I don't mind how you distinguish old vs new; a hline ---, a title ### Old answer or a block quote > . Please can you include it as I have now gotten a ping for an answer that mostly complains about your edit, and the user refuses to comment here.