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Don't allow question deletion after responses
I just spent over half an hour writing a detailed answer to a question in Software Development, only to find the question got deleted when I tried to post the answer. This questions was about conversion of integers to floating point.
That shouldn't be allowed. The question already had three comment threads with something like a couple dozen total comments. Once the community spends time on a question, the original author shouldn't be allowed to delete it anymore. Put another way, when the community has put effort into something, it belongs in part to that community, not solely to the original author anymore.
The author may have deleted the question because it gathered some (deserved) downvotes. Once you post something, you should accept that it's "out there". Allowing someone to cherry pick by leaving only positively received questions deprives everyone else of being able to judge them properly, and games the system by making their total activities appear more positive than they actually are.
Worse than the question being gone, my draft is also gone. I was given no opportunity to save the draft myself. It just poofed away. If I had been able to copy the draft onto my local system, I could have asked a targeted question the draft would have been a good answer to.
1 answer
Thank you for the report. Whatever we decide about the deletion of questions, having something deleted out from under you should not result in data loss like this. We should detect that a question was deleted while you were writing an answer and give you a chance to save your work, and/or we should allow you to see your own answers even if their questions have been deleted. I'm sorry this happened to you.
I found the question I think you're referring to ("Uniform floating point from unsigned integer"). Yes, the question is deleted, so anybody without the ability to see deleted posts gets a 404. However, for those who can see deleted posts, the answer is there and shows as not deleted, which is a weird state for a post to be in. I presume it's because question deletion propagates to answers that are already there, which yours wasn't. (I actually found the question from the answer on your profile page.)
I'll be happy to provide you with the markdown source for your answer. I can paste it into this answer, or if you prefer some other transmission method, let me know. Again, I'm sorry this happened; I'm glad that in this case it's not really lost, just hard to access.
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