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The question what-should-every-programmer-know-about-web-development was removed (google web cache version here) with the following reason:

This question was removed from Programmers Stack Exchange for reasons of moderation

The question was the top of with 2194+ points and had a nice and big comprehensive response with 1923+ points.

Even after reading the help area on removed questions I still do not have a clue why this question was removed. "Being removed because of moderation" sounds too vague

From my point of view, the top answer had a ton of good information and it is bad losing it.

Can someone explain me why the question was removed?

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  • This has been reported to the community team. Investigation is underway. Will post more info as I gets it.
    – user28988
    Jun 21, 2013 at 18:51
  • It wasn't deleted deliberately, but as a consequence of its somewhat complicated history (it was originally migrated from Stack Overflow).
    – ChrisF Mod
    Jun 21, 2013 at 19:17

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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There was a bug in the scheduled job that cleans up migration stubs: it also automatically deleted questions that had been migrated and then rejected. Obviously, that was not the intent and has been fixed.

Of course, the other problem here is that a very popular question was rejected years after being migrated and after many edits and improvements had been made. The appropriate action here would've been to lock it. Unfortunately, a big part of the value that a question like this brings to the site comes from the ability of the community to edit it, updating and improving the answers as the years roll by. In other words, the question has value as a wiki. But there's no type of lock that reflects this need to foster editing while preventing pile-on answers.

...Well, now there is:

wiki answer lock

This particular question was well-suited for testing this strategy: there were only a few answers, and the top answer had massively more activity (and popularity) than the rest. So I've cleaned up the migration rejection, restored the top answer, and locked it.

We'll see how this works in practice, but at very least it should never be accidentally deleted again.

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  • See - meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/5991/…
    – ChrisF Mod
    Jun 21, 2013 at 19:40
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    @Shog9 I get a "Locked posts can't be voted on!" message when trying to upvote (the locked question obviously, not this one). Is that intentional? Looks like a bug to me, cuz it's undermining one of the core features, isn't it?
    – nietonfir
    Jun 23, 2013 at 10:15
  • This is how locking works, nietonfir.
    – Shog9
    Jun 23, 2013 at 15:04

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