2

Our resident troll posted a question today which I thought he had asked before, and that seems likely because Reg closed and deleted it.

While Reg was dealing with it, I tried to locate the earlier example. Finding questions which have been deleted appears to be remarkably difficult: presumably that's by design.

However, since it's possible to get a "That question has been deleted" page, and 10k users can see them under certain circumstances, deleted questions must still be held in the database.

An SEDE query which finds all of a user's posts, like

select p.Id as [Post Link],p.Id
from Posts p
where 
p.OwnerUserId = 23135

will find some relevant questions, but only those which have not been deleted.

Is there any way of finding deleted questions?

2
  • 1
    I just search for deleted:1 is:question, but if I remember correctly, the deleted option is mod-only...
    – RegDwigнt Mod
    Commented Feb 18, 2013 at 14:46
  • 1
    Perhaps it is in SEDE too; but if I can see them, why can I not search for them? :-(
    – Andrew Leach Mod
    Commented Feb 18, 2013 at 14:47

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

If you aren't a moderator, there isn't a way to search deleted questions. If your reputation allows you to access https://english.stackexchange.com/tools, you can look at the "delete" tab, and see the posts that have been deleted in the past 30 days.

SEDE shows the posts that are not deleted. Since its data are not live-updated, you could get deleted posts as result of a query. SEDE's data is updated more frequently now, than in the past. Even if the data are updated every 15 days, searching for deleted questions using the SEDE is unpractical, as you should check if the returned post is now deleted.

4
  • Thanks. Presumably questions deleted by a moderator rather than as a result of community votes are also excluded from the Tools? This one doesn't seem to be in the "Recently Deleted" list.
    – Andrew Leach Mod
    Commented Feb 21, 2013 at 14:19
  • @AndrewLeach Pretty sure that moderator deletions should be there; I don’t know about self-deletions, though. But you’re right: that one isn’t. Also, SEDE is now updated very frequently, by the way, like every few days.
    – tchrist Mod
    Commented Feb 21, 2013 at 17:03
  • @AndrewLeach Probably, posts deleted from moderators are probably not listed because you cannot vote to undelete them.
    – avpaderno
    Commented Feb 21, 2013 at 17:10
  • @kiamlaluno As far as I can tell, those ones are just greyed-out in the 10k tools, like this deleted posting. It is in the recently deleted list, but is greyed-out because immoderators cannot undelete it.
    – tchrist Mod
    Commented Feb 21, 2013 at 18:17

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .