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I've asked more SE questions than I have remaining brain cells to keep track of them.

Sometimes I remember enough about the question to ask for assistance in a site's meta

and sometimes I run across an old link to a question that I hadn't remembered, but seeing it again realize I really want to know the answer!

I think the roomba itself is great and does a useful service, (except when it did this):

but of course when it's my questions that are roombad I'm slightly flummoxed.

Are there SE-friendly (not cheating) ways of keeping track of my silently roombad or roomba-imminent questions, and even working in a more roomba-aware way?

Some script? Should I keep an Excel spreadsheet with all my questions and make cells turn red for the questions reaching their six month anniversary this month so that I can look in on them?

Something else?

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  • 1
    I'd say... not worry so much about them. I mean, I guess you can keep track of every question you have ever asked but... why?
    – Journeyman Geek
    Commented Jan 2, 2022 at 1:07
  • 9
    I believe there are plans at some point in the near future to modify the "recently deleted questions" to be "deleted questions" instead of only showing the last 60 days... so might be worth waiting for that...
    – Jon Clements
    Commented Jan 2, 2022 at 1:09
  • 7
    @JourneymanGeek I care very much about my questions and am not going to start not caring because someone told me not to.
    – uhoh
    Commented Jan 2, 2022 at 1:09
  • @JonClements I'm afraid of what I may loose waiting for that. Apparently I'm already loosing my memories on my laptop. But I do see there are some recent answers to Show all of my question/answers to me even if they are deleted with the status-planned tag, so there's hope!
    – uhoh
    Commented Jan 2, 2022 at 1:22
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    The last I heard was it was planned to be sometime this month - whether that's still the case I've no idea...
    – Jon Clements
    Commented Jan 2, 2022 at 1:25
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    @richardec I knew I was "hot" but had no idea about total Q's, no wonder my brain cell number is feeling more and more inadequate.
    – uhoh
    Commented Jan 2, 2022 at 2:10
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    Oh, wow! So you've had the most HNQs in the history of the network - 462 - very slightly over twice as many as the top 2nd!
    – user1091571
    Commented Jan 2, 2022 at 2:11
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    I've asked more SE questions than I have remaining brain cells to keep track of them. - since a cell is very small, and you've only asked 5k questions, I guess your brain is really, really tiny, so maybe that's why you're forgetting your questions. :P
    – user1091571
    Commented Jan 2, 2022 at 2:13
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    Is there a reason you don't just bookmark each of your questions in your browser? They could reasonably be organized in folders and/or given tags or notes, even if just by editing the bookmark title, which fit whatever organization criteria you have (well, OK, a lot of possible organization criteria could be used, perhaps not all). The creation and/or last visit date for the bookmark could be used to determine when you need/want to check up on them.
    – Makyen
    Commented Jan 2, 2022 at 2:19
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    @Makyen Yes, the reason is that I'd never thought of bookmarking my own questions. Yes, since they can be displayed sorted I could keep an eye on those reaching six months. I'd have to check all the 0 vote posts individually to see if they are also zero up votes and not +N/-N, then check the 0 vote questions for absence of comments (or whatever the roomba criteria is) but this is definitely a roomba-aware way to work. Please consider posting it as an answer. Thanks!
    – uhoh
    Commented Jan 2, 2022 at 2:54
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    @uhoh You can also use SE's bookmarking, which provides live question stats. Such bookmarks are, primarily, done on a per-site basis, but there is a list of your bookmarks across all sites in your stackexchange.com network profile, but the network list doesn't appear to display deleted questions. I'm unable to verify if your per-site SE bookmarks will display your own bookmarked deleted questions when you don't have enough reputation on that site to view deleted questions. With >10k rep, you do see deleted questions in per-site bookmarks.
    – Makyen
    Commented Jan 2, 2022 at 4:23
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    This sounds like it is in need of some [sede] magic.
    – Luuklag
    Commented Jan 2, 2022 at 8:56
  • SEDE wouldn't have stuff that was deleted previously tho?
    – Journeyman Geek
    Commented Jan 2, 2022 at 9:52
  • I'm wondering if RSS feeds would work here. The per user feeds catch everything on a site, but you'd need a client with permanent retentention and good filtering and search
    – Journeyman Geek
    Commented Jan 2, 2022 at 10:23
  • @JourneymanGeek I've never used RSS and only vaguely aware of its existence. If there's a solution that a non-developer (okay, some python only) could easily use I'd be very interested in an answer like that or at least something pointing me in the right direction.
    – uhoh
    Commented Jan 2, 2022 at 23:14

2 Answers 2

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The Stack Exchange Data Explorer might help a bit. I have written a network-wide query which concentrates on the two Roomba reasons which apply on non-closed questions: RemoveDeadQuestions and RemoveAbandonedQuestions.

Here are the top results for your account:

enter image description here

It is possible for the 'Time to live' to go negative, because

  1. SEDE is updated once a week, on Sunday morning
  2. These Roomba checks are only run once a week
  3. There are some questions which should've been Roomba'ed but for some unfathomable reasons are not
Improve this answer
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  • 2
    SEDE to the rescue!
    – uhoh
    Commented Jan 4, 2022 at 20:55
-5

It is ridiculous that users have to keep track of their questions themselves while Stack Exchange is silently removing them. A better solution would be not to remove good questions in the first place. Here's one example of proposals for that: Decrease the required view count to prevent Roomba deletion when score = 0 on smaller sites. Hundreds of my questions with score=0 have been removed so far by Roomba. You're rather lucky that in https://space.stackexchange.com/ questions tend to receive more votes than in many other SE websites.

As a complement to Glorfindel's great answer, one could search for user:43 deleted:1 closed:0 is:question migrated:no duplicate:no (changing 43 with your user ID on the given SE website) to list all the removed questions on the sites you have enough rep (>=10k for graduated sites, >=3k for beta sites).

Look at the carnage on my questions:

Site # of removed questions (score=0) query
Web Applications 94 query
Medical Sciences 65 query
Super User 61 query
Software Recommendations 38 query
Stack Overflow 21 query

In response to the comment

 If [the questions] were good, they wouldn't be removed, because Roomba wouldn't trigger on them... 1 hour ago Nij

here are some examples of questions (not mine) that got removed by Roomba:

Those are perfectly fine questions that should have never been removed.

Improve this answer
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  • 1
    Sorry to hear it, I don’t know why some communities are so stingy with question up voting, it’s a cultural difference that sometimes seems to get entrenched.
    – uhoh
    Commented Jan 8, 2022 at 3:55
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    @uhoh Indeed. I've added a useful query and some removal stats on other SE sites if curious.
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Commented Jan 8, 2022 at 5:46
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    If they were good, they wouldn't be removed, because Roomba wouldn't trigger on them...
    – Nij
    Commented Jan 8, 2022 at 11:04
  • @Nij good questions sometimes attract no upvotes, esp. on SE websites with a low view/question ratio. See Decrease the required view count to prevent Roomba deletion when score = 0 on smaller sites.
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Commented Jan 8, 2022 at 11:10
  • @Nij I've added in my answer some examples of questions that got removed by Roomba. Those are perfectly fine questions that should have never been removed. Please tell my why you think they aren't good questions.
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Commented Jan 8, 2022 at 12:52
  • Re "some examples of questions that got removed by Roomba": Those are not your questions. The reader may expect that from reading the first part ("Hundreds of my questions" and "carnage on my questions"). Perhaps make it clearer?
    – This_is_NOT_a_forum
    Commented Jan 10, 2022 at 12:06
  • @P.Mort.-forgotClayShirky_q Thanks for the edit. I didn't put my questions to avoid getting more downvotes. Nij wasn't referring to my questions but any questions removed by Roomba. I've edited the answer to make it clear.
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Commented Jan 10, 2022 at 12:07
  • (Both questions were undeleted on 2022-01-03.)
    – This_is_NOT_a_forum
    Commented Jan 10, 2022 at 12:10
  • @P.Mort.-forgotClayShirky_q That's right, btw that's what triggered the OP to post this meta question.
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Commented Jan 10, 2022 at 12:12

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