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A post on Super User was deleted. Its final revision contained an uploaded image, which has since been deleted from Stack Exchange's image host (Imgur):

Why did this image disappear?

The original image can be found on the web archive of the page:

original image in web archive

As you can see, the image is not NSFW or offensive in any way.

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1 Answer 1

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The question was flag deleted as spam or offensive. Because many posts that are spam or rude have problematic images (or people are using our image hosting to host images of themselves that get flag deleted) our system automatically tells imgur to delete images that were in posts deleted through spam or offensive flags.

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    Since when was this implemented?
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented May 8, 2022 at 0:44
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    @Sonic It was implemented around July 2019, then was broken for a while, and was fixed again in May 2021.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented May 8, 2022 at 1:48
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    There is possible major drawback to this. In theory, troll can post spam post and put existing valid image in it, for example this one (your current avatar), then have the image deleted when their spam is nuked. Meaning, power to trolls to delete any picture they want. Are there any measures in place against it? Is the deletion reversible somehow? /cc @animuson
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented May 8, 2022 at 13:44
  • @ShadowWizardSaysNoMoreWar I just checked some deleted spam posts on my sites, and AFAIK, it's not applied to every spam/offensive post. This image from this answer (Jun 2021) got deleted, but this image of soccer players from this answer (Jun 2021) and dunno what this image is from this answer (Dec 2021) were not deleted.
    – Meta Andrew T.
    Commented May 8, 2022 at 17:11
  • @MetaAndrewT. weird, if there was some manual check before deletion the image discussed in this question wouldn't have been removed, so maybe it's still broken a bit.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented May 8, 2022 at 17:52
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    @MetaAndrewT. The current design only detects them if they are formatted as images in the current revision of the post. It won't ever delete images that are merely linked.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented May 8, 2022 at 20:11
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    Donno what the current implementation looks like, @shadow, but the original spec required a check against the imgur metadata specifically to reduce risk here: if the image wasn't uploaded within a fairly narrow window of the deleted post's creation, it wouldn't be automatically deleted.
    – Shog9
    Commented May 9, 2022 at 14:48
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    @Shog9 huh, smart.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented May 9, 2022 at 15:12

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