I was checking back and my original unanswered question "Scrub PDF Malware Files to XPS Format" seems to have been removed from Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange (as in I've searched everywhere and can't find it) and is also not listed in my user account.  An exact duplicate of my original question is now located at and a few others.  Does the Stack Exchange network discard or delete old unanswered questions?  Why is my question missing from the site and now located at a clone site under a different author?
11706
Related to Meta Super User efforts:  and Meta Server Fault efforts:  We already auto-remove negatively voted unanswered old questions automatically after 30 days, network wide, with no human intervention required. I was thinking we might extend that to remove old, unanswered zero score questions... based on the following criteria:  fewer than (question age in days * 1.5) views 0 score or lower, or 1 score or lower if the original author is deleted no answers 1 comment or fewer asked more than 1 year ago (thus based on creation date, not last activity date, so , or a user editing it, does not give a doomed question 365 more days of zombie &quot;life&quot;)  See the results of this query on:  (10509) |  (787) |  (650) This query has been refined based on the comments, and this is the final version that will roll out tonight. Every site in the network (except metas) will automatically delete old questions that meet this criteria from this point forward.
5343
Looks like there's a small bug in the UI: I posted a question here on meta.SE which ended up being just something dumb I was doing and no use to anyone in the future. At first I posted an answer saying what the dumb thing was, but then I realized that the whole thing had no value, so I deleted the answer, and then deleted the question — whereupon it asked me:  Delete this answered question? We do not recommend deleting questions with answers because doing so deprives future readers of this knowledge. Repeated deletion of answered questions can result in your account being blocked from asking. Are you sure you wish to delete?  (Screenshot below) Probably shouldn't ask (or add to the tally) if the only answers are deleted ones...
70919
I noticed that the  was deleted.   When the  came out, I tried to look for my old answer as well as others for comparison.  Why not just mark the old one superseded by [insert link]?  Note: I don't care about lost rep. There were a lot of useful links in answers and comments there (and some less-than-useful ones too).     Old CoC FAQ may be available  and . Source: (, ).
266
I discovered a strange, blank link in 's Top Network Posts:        The above link and screenshot are of the user's Unix &amp; Linux site profile, but this issue can be reproduced on any of the user's site profiles other than Meta Stack Exchange (as the blank post appears to be on this site, and posts from the same site are excluded).  The link seems to go to , which features a really negative question ID (close to the lowest value that can be represented by a 32-bit signed integer, specifically -(2^31) + 1005), and lacks the title in the URL that is present in all of the other links. It leads to a 404 error.  Going to the  seems to go to an actual answer on a question migrated to this site, which happens to have a score of 13 (as of the time this was asked).  Why is the question ID incorrect here? Based on the duplicates, it seems that this affects posts (both questions and answers) that were migrated from other sites: somehow, the question ID seems to be getting messed up.  Update: It looks like the above linked user has deleted their account on this site, so the issue cannot be reproduced on the profile I originally reported. It can, however, be reproduced on . The errant link in that profile is , and the errant question ID seems to also be close to the lowest possible 32-bit signed integer, -(2^31) + 3412.
94757
I  sometimes wonder where to ask a particular question (on Ubuntu? Unix and Linux? Superuser?) because all of the sites will have great people to help. This is not a common case for me but I already had it happening.   It may be, though, that a question goes unanswered for a while and would be ,  all in all, a better fit for another site.   Is it acceptable, then, to migrate it ? Or move (delete and repost)? Or copy?
87586
See also:   Many of the newer sites have a certain degree of overlap. With the creation of Chem.SE, I noticed quite a few questions on Physics.SE which could have benefited from the chem community and vice versa. There also are a few that could benefit from bio.SE.. Now these questions don't warrant a migration. They can be double-posted, but this doesn't lead to a smooth experience. Even when cross-linked, changes to either post (new answers,new comments,etc) aren't effectively relayed to the other site, and the two questions are just that-- two, separate questions. One solution that came to my mind was a &quot;soft migration&quot; option for mods. By this, a question on site A stays on site A. But, it appears in the site B question list as well. Edits/answers should bump it. Basically, there will be a placeholder item in the questions list of site B. It shows the votes/views/answers of the post on site A, along with the tags (maybe stylized differently). These should be an unobtrusive way to quickly identify what the site is. The post should also be bumped whenever the post is bumped on Site A, and it should display the rep/time/etc of the bumping user as usual. Here's a quick mockup of what happens on the site B question list:  Without being obtrusive or in-your-face (stuff like [migrated] is sort of in-your-face), the post is elegantly shown to be on Physics.SE (well, if you know the icon, anyway). The tags are italicized to show that they link to a different site tags, and the &quot;bumping user&quot; (me) has his/her rep on that site shown. We can also add an indicator on the question on site A () that shows that it was soft-migrated. We can use tooltips as well on the icons to tell us why they're here. After all, half of SE documentation is in tooltips.  Now I know that these issues will probably be raised:  Rep: An avid user on Site B gets no Site B rep for giving a good answer on Site A. Frankly, I don't care about this to much, but others may.  Implementation: It may get complicated. Internally, I'd propose that none of the question data is copied, rather Site A pushes the vote/bump data whenever a vote/bump happens. The easiest way to then implement the soft merge would be to have a table of questions soft-merged &quot;to&quot; site B on site B itself, with columns for all the vote/etc data. The questions table should have an extra column for &quot;soft-migrated to&quot;--that way Site A can determine where to push new data to on every vote/bump. Now, all Site B has to do is take the JOIN of the questions table and the soft-merge table and display them in the new questions list (or any list, for that matter). With some extra formatting, maybe. Of course, I may be oversimplifying this and I don't really know what I'm talking about ;-)  Is there a need? : Yes, I would say so. Such questions can get awesome answers is both the communities participate, but our don't-cross-post-much policy deters this. In the end, this will result in better post quality, making the Internet better. Also, as area51 grows, we will see this problem more and more, and this will become more and more necessary.   Thoughts? Any better ideas? Waffles?  Update: Another use case for this would be to soft migrate all MSO  questions over to child metas, effectively solving
113963
Any way how to get    my all un-answered questions  from across all SE sites?
96800
A user asks a question. It gets downvoted.(to oblivion) And then gets deleted by a mod.     This question should then be accessible to the user in the "deleted recent questions" link but this doesn't happen.    If a user has asked only one question (which gets deleted) then this link goes missing. Only after asking another question (which must not get deleted), is the user able to see that link.     Is this a bug or a new-user-restriction?
76350
. I did a trick:  I clicked on &quot;Ask Question&quot; here on Meta Then I clicked the icon &quot;Add image&quot; I uploaded the image from my computer and copied the link  I pasted the link to the comment I discarded the question.  Is this a clean and correct approach? An example thought why this possibly wouldn't be clean: Is the image hosted permanently? There could be, in theory, some &quot;garbage collector&quot; that would delete all images that are not linked from within any question (well, mine is now linked from this question, though not normally - funny enough right :-)).
2736
I was reviewing some stuff today, and I came across a rather ridiculous answer (see screenshot). I wanted to see the question and other answers, so I clicked on the link, and found that the answer I was reviewing was in fact deleted. Could someone take a look at it?
69874
I was recently browsing through my answers and found  question where the author indicated they were able to solve their issue with a solution similar to answer I provided.  Problem is that the original author account has been deleted and they can not mark my answer as the accepted answer.  How do you handle marking the answers for questions where the original author SO account has been deleted?
33591
(currently deleted (visible only to 10kers)) is a great example of a duplicate question that should not be deleted. [Note: this question was later merged into , which resulted in the original being hard-deleted. This issue with merging  ] The titles of the duplicates are completely different.  Having duplicates around greatly aids search hits on the site. We need to keep questions like this around for the benefit of the community. Both questions have around 4K views.  They are both relevant.  I cannot believe that a question with over 3K views is being deleted. Edit Search for python continue line and python line break in google.  Both answers are top hits.  They should both be open.
64918
If a citizen of EU would request all his questions and answers to be deleted from all Stack Exchange sites, would that request be carried out?  I'm not just talking about account deletion, where questions and answers by the user are being anonymized. I'm talking about the case where the user demands all his questions and answered be deleted.  Would Stack Exchange be doing something illegal if they refused the request?
66582
I have read lot of questions related to deleted questions or answers to be available for users to see in their profiles, but my question is, does excess deletion of our own questions and answers attract penalty from the owners/moderators of SO?  Sometimes what happens is, when we see a question, we don't understand it properly but jump into them to answer to get early upvotes and later (when we get downvoted) we realize our mistake and would want to delete our own answers. The reason could be any of the following:   The answer is just not reasonable enough for the question asked. To save your reputation points and avoid further downvotes. Your answer has 0 upvotes and a better answer is already available for the question. The question gets edited and your answer is no longer valid. New people would not know that the question has been edited and they start downvoting your answer since it's no longer relevant.   In doing this we might go to extreme cases, maybe in the range of deleting hundreds of our answers. So is there an upper limit for the number of answers we can delete in order to avoid penalty (if there is any such penalty for deletion)?
56844
A  appears to have been deleted, and deletion is attributed to a moderator,  deleted by Sathyajith Bhat♦ 12 hours ago , however,  (however, they did previously (unsuccessfully) tried migrating it to another site in the network where they're also a moderator, but migration was rejected by another moderator, it was then on hold on webapps, and then the hold was removed, which was supposed to have been the end of it).  Can someone explain what's going on here?  And restore the question that clearly wasn't meant to have been deleted, was a HNQ, and has 75 votes on the question, plus 74 votes on the top answer, and 56 on second answer; and 19 on third?  There's a lot of links to this question, too, and now they're all broken, making SE look like a community hostile to a popular question ontopic for the site it was on.
119329
Recently a question of mine was migrated from unix.se to SO. After a few hours I noticed that all answers and comments from a given user had disappeared (there were only 3 or 4 users who contributed). I could be wrong but I don't think he is registered on SO.  What happens to comments and answers from a user registered on site A but not on site B when a question is migrated from site A to B?  He may have deleted them himself (I don't know why he would have), in which case it's moot, but if SO deleted them, that kind of stinks because they were valuable comments (and also added context to some conversation).
77015
I am new to Stack Exchange.  Math and physics newsletters get to my inbox every Thursday, and every Thursday there are 5-day-old answers to questions as I read them for the first time.  Too often a question of interest  has already been closed because of the low quality of recent answers and comments.  I have no reputation, and to do almost anything requires more reputation than I have.  Nothing I have found in Help helps (however I noted one user submitted an "answer" because he said he did not have the reputation to comment.  I have started wondering if Joseph Heller is looking over my shoulder.  Any help, please?  Thank you to those who made useful suggestions.  The question, "How does a new user begin using Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange?," clearly expressed my difficulties.  I would close the question if I knew how.  Good night.