Hi there. I have a question regarding users deleting their own questions after they've been answered. It's happened to me twice (i.e. I answered a question and the OP deletes the question shortly after), but I'm not certain on what I should do. I get the impression from the Meta that this is not ok, but I haven't found a clear recommendation on what to do about them exactly. I thought about the large thread for undeletion/reopening/etc requests, but that didn't seem like the appropriate venue.

Does anyone have any advice on how I should proceed? Thanks.

(And by proceed, I mean that loosely. If the answer is just to ignore it, I'm fine with that too.)

@TheoreticalEconomist Here is what a moderator said about this on meta: Why do some users delete their questions after receiving an answer?

> Please, if someone removes a question taking an answer with it, let the moderators know.

Oh, huh. I missed this one, despite having looked through three or four different meta questions. Thanks very much, @MartinS.

You have the advantage if you can see deleted questions, which is from 10k+. In that case you can directly flag that question.

Possibly you could flag also some other content by the same user, if you know the user.

Unfortunately, I don't have that privilege, but I've managed to flag the recently deleted question. There's a slightly older one that I'll have to track down, but I do remember the user that did it.

If you simply let the mods know that "my answer was deleted by the OP", they should be able to find answer. (Mods can search for deleted content, regular user can only find their own deleted content and again, it is 10k+ privilege.)

However, I am not sure what should I flag if I simply want to let the mods know about something.

However, I think that Requests for Reopen & Undeletion Votes could be a reasonable idea, too. I believe I have seen a few such posts request tehre.

For example, this one. I am pretty sure that they were a few other similar requests.

In any case, I hope some of the moderators will also notice your question - and let you know what they suggest to do in such situations.

I see. I guess one thing that makes me hesitate about using that thread is that (in my opinion, at least) it seems to make a big deal about the question being deleted. My experience of this so far has been that I've put in fairly little effort in the answer, so I didn't mind seeing them deleted. (I can only speculate about motivations of the OP for deleting, but as far as I can tell, they vary.)

BTW I wanted to link to Mariano's answer rather to the question in my first message.

Yes, I did see Mariano's answer first when I clicked your link.

Thanks for the help. I guess for slightly more egregious deletions, I'll probably use math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19042/…

@TheoreticalEconomist In that case you can probably ask mods first (either in chat or by flag). And depending on what they do and whether you consider the post worth going through the trouble, you can still post the request in the long thread.

I see that what I wrote now is in the same spirit as your last message - but you were faster, you posted it before I finished typing. :-)

Well, that was the idea of asking here first. I guess I'll try and find something relevant to flag for the older deletion. Thanks again for the help!

@TheoreticalEconomist May I ask you a favor? Do you happen to have a link to some of the delete questions where you posted an answer?

I am not sure whether I remember this correctly and an experiment might help.

I think that any user can see their deleted post provided that they have a link. I am sure this works for questions. But I am not sure whether the same is true for answers.

Yes. The recent one is this. There's an older one which I've lost the link to.

Ok and if you click on the link to the question can you see it, or do you just get message that the question was deleted?

And does this change if you try link directly to the answer?

I can see it when I click on it.

Linking directly to the answer doesn't change anything, aside from the page showing my answer first.

(That is, automatically scrolling down to the answer.)

I see. So if somebody is under 10k, they still can see their deleted content (and it works both for answers and for questions), but they need to have the link from somewhere.

Thanks, I was not sure whether it works for answers. I hope I'll remember this until next time when this information is needed.

Sure, no problem. I will say though, losing access to your deleted content (especially if it's been unilaterally deleted by another user) is a little strange. Requiring 10k+, at least for these cases, seems silly to me.

This means that what I wrote here was incorrect: "You have the advantage if you can see deleted questions, which is from 10k+." Even users below 10k can see deleted question, if they have posted an answer there. (And thus they can flag the deleted question.)

Well, partly. If you managed to keep track of the link, you can see it. If you've lost it, you can check in your recently deleted questions. However, if it's not there, then you're out of luck, I think.

Or is there another way to track down your answers that I'm not thinking of?

Hi, @DanielFischer. I'd like your input on this, if you have the time.

If you remember some part of the title, google it and google can still remember it, you can get the link. So maybe I would reformulate if you managed to keep track fo the link to if you are able to track down the link. (And it does not matter whether you saved it somewhere, you find it in your browser history, you find it through google....)

Data explorer is another possibility, but only if the post was deleted between the two updates.

Some suggestions related to this can be found on meta, for example: Are there some possibilities for users below 10k to see deleted posts of other users? or How to determine which question/answer was deleted? And perhaps the posts tagged search+deleted-questions

A quick Google search hasn't been that fruitful, but that might be because I don't remember the title at all. It's been a while. I'll try to check out your other links, however.

Do you remember at least the rough topic of the question?

Yes. Something about constrained optimization. Lagrange multipliers? Or Kuhn-Tucker? Something like that.

I have tried a few searches in Google and checked cached version to see whether I find something. But I did not succeed. (BTW I'll also mention that there is chatroom dedicated to searching.)

Probably this is a job for the mods - they have better tools at their disposal.

I should get back to grading :-) Have a nice day!

Ha, of course. I should do some real work as well. Thanks again for the help!

@TheoreticalEconomist You got some pretty good guidance from Martin already. The short form of it is "flag, flaggity, flag". But you can of course also decide to say "good riddance" and ignore it. That's an appealing option if the question was trivial and the answer required no effort to speak of. But in cases where the question asker makes a habit of deleting the question after getting an answer, it would be better if we get to know it. So if in doubt flag.

You can always say that you don't (necessarily) want your answer undeleted and that it's just an informative flag so that we can look whether it's a habit of the asker in the flag message.

I suppose that if I can find the deleted posts, I simply flag that post. What if I do not have anything to flag? I want to make free flag to moderators with text: "The OP deleted the question where I have posted an answer yesterday. But I cannot locate the question (I am below 10k and cannot search for my deleted posts)." What should I flag?

@DanielFischer Is there general advice what to flag when I want to post something that moderators should see (i.e., I want to include a text in a free form flag), but I cannot find a relevant post or the problem is not tied to a specific post?

I suppose that if I find a moderator in chat, I could ask the mod to create a private chatroom and this could serve the purpose of getting some information across to moderators. But let's consider a situation where I want to use flag (or I do not have time for chat, or no mod is available in chat, ...)

I guess something similar was discussed on meta in the past...?

Maybe this is what I had in mind - it is somewhat in similar spirit: How to flag names?

> If the user has $0$ posts, flag one of your posts and explain the problem.

@DanielFischer Is the advice I quoted above (from the linked answer) a reasonable one? If there's nothing to flag (no post/comment relevant directly to my flag), then I can choose some random post of mine?

@MartinSleziak If you can't flag a specific post (be it because you have no link to it or that the problem is not about a post), flag a post of somebody involved. If it's about an answer that was deleted by the question asker, it makes much sense to flag a post of oneself, though if one remembers the asker it also makes much sense to flag one of their posts.

@MartinSleziak Yes.

Thanks for the response! It seems to be inline with the recommendation I found on meta. (Although it is not exactly the same question, it is at least similar to what I asked here.) BTW this answer is about the same topic I've mentioned above: How to flag a user for a strange behavior

@DanielFischer Could you take a peek at the four consecutively downvotes to answers I received again, today? The same count: four consecutive downvotes took place on April 8th, as well. math.stackexchange.com/users/9003/amwhy?tab=reputation

@quid you're more than welcome to look into the matter I commented on immediately above.

@amWhy in fact I was just at it. :-)

@quid You read my mind!

Did you have a question @juliusvillareal? You just joined Android.se today. Curious why you migrated here. Oops, I forget, you can't comment quite yet.