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My question was deleted. Is there a policy for deleting questions here? Is there a meta answer showing this very policy? (Or is questions deleted more randomly). Not that I take it too seriously but I feel that deleting a fair question is suspicious. That my question was put on hold was also suspicious, but deleting, really? How come.

Is this following a guideline? The deletion of questions on hold. Is it perhaps something that happens automatically after due time.

I asked a question here (I only have one question here on Ask!). I got an acceptable answer , or so I thought. The answer turned out not to work in ubuntu 32 bit, only on ubuntu 64 bit. I needed it to work in 32 bit as well.

My other question was deleted (very similar question but with the specifics that I wanted an answer that worked on ubuntu 32 bit).

It went - after 5 days it was put on "hold", kind of, "unspecific question", then now 4 months later it turned out it has been deleted.

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    Well, if the question is exactly the same, and the only difference is architecture, then marking as "duplicate" and "on hold" was right - after several months I believe it's OK to be deleted. If the answer on your other question is "not working on 32bit" then you need to comment as such on the answer and ask for clarification.
    – Thomas Ward Mod
    Jan 18, 2015 at 23:10
  • Here is a link to the question. My guess was that you got a few close votes back when the question wasn't so clear and then those kinda "carried it through" the queue. Happens sometimes I'm afraid. Instead of asking a new question it would have been better if you had just edited your original question to include the new information and perhaps offered a bounty to get it more eyes. We don't really need two questions for the same topic.
    – Seth
    Jan 19, 2015 at 2:18

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I can't be sure without a link to your deleted question but yes, closed questions are deleted by the system after a while. You can see the details here, but in short:

If the question was closed more than 9 days ago, and ...

  • not closed as a duplicate
  • has a score of 0 or less
  • is not locked
  • has no answers with a score > 0
  • has no accepted answer
  • has no pending reopen votes
  • has not been edited in the past 9 days

... it will be automatically deleted

This is not a judgement on you, no humans were involved in this deletion. It is simply part of the automatic cleanup that is part of the Stack Exchange system.

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  • After 30 days I'm fairly shore it was still there. After 4 months it's not. I accept your answer althought it somewhat remains a mystery on why it was deleted. MY THOUGHT WAS. Perhaps someone has the same problem as me. Then they will keep looking more without finding a right solution. My question had hints from me on where to look for a solution although I did not manage to solve it. TOO BAD.
    – r4.
    Jan 19, 2015 at 0:56
  • @r4. Well, the system is imperfect. A lot of crap is posted and this automated solution is an attempt to clear it out. Most older questions are dead, the poster no longer cares and often hasn't visited the site since posting. Most such deletions are correct and improve the site, every now and then something good is removed as well. Feel free to post your question again if you think it can be useful. It might do better this time around.
    – terdon
    Jan 19, 2015 at 1:11

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