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This:

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/40296/what-is-the-best-java-programming-book-out-there-for-starters

Was closed as a duplicate. The question it was allegedly a duplicate of has been deleted.

Needless to say, this is a tad useless.

Do we have a process for this? Should we not delete questions which are the targets of closed-as-duplicate-of links? Should we unclose questions which have dangling closed-as-duplicate-of links? Should we delete them too?

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  • To answer your secondary question, we get automatically notified by the system when attempting to delete a question that other questions have been closed as duplicates of and thus we can either delete all the duplicates or re-close them with a different close reason. This was a screw up.
    – yannis Mod
    Commented Dec 29, 2012 at 12:35
  • I flagged the original deleted question on SO to see if we could get it locked instead of deleted due to the number of links that point there, and it looks like it was undeleted yesterday so you can now view it :)
    – Rachel
    Commented Dec 31, 2012 at 15:24

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Indeed.

In this case I'm going to reclose it as not constructive.

We tried to accommodate book recommendations but it really didn't work - it's just another form of shopping recommendation after all and these have been found not to work with the Stack Exchange question and answer format.

In future the best approach to cases where the "original" of a duplicate is now deleted is to flag the question. If you can find another duplicate (they often exist) include the link to that, but we'll take a look and see what's best to do in each case.

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  • I actually came here with a question about book recommendations, but brief searches led me to the verdict you mention. It's a shame we can't manage to handle book recommendations; i needed one as part of an answer, and instead of being able to link to an existing answer which distils the experience of the community, i had to answer from my own limited knowledge.
    – Tom Anderson
    Commented Dec 29, 2012 at 14:49

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