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The original question: How do I change my Profile Picture or Avatar? (I have less than 10K rep, so I can't see the question anymore.)

When I originally posted the question, I realized that someone might, erroneously, consider it a duplicate, so I included the following text (taken from Google cache):

Before you vote to close this as a duplicate of How do I change my stackoverflow profile picture [closed]? or non-gravatar avatar?, please realize that those question are about how to use a non-gravatar image (i.e. adding a new feature). This question is about how to change the avatar using the gravatar website (i.e. using an existing feature).

However, since it was a community wiki -- as all faq-proposed questions should be -- someone removed that text from the answer to make it faq quality. Eventually both the question and answer were improved to be of high quality and I found them to be very useful.

The other questions I linked to were not of faq quality: they didn't meet the guidelines as described here, and didn't provide the same information in a concise and easy to understand manner... something a user would expect from an faq question/answer.

My intention was to create an FAQ question/answer that would help others solve this problem. I added a link to it from the official FAQ question. However, now that it is deleted, the link takes you to an empty page.

I'm wondering why this question was deleted. Is there any way to undelete it? Apparently I can't vote to undelete it... hell, I can't even see the question. Why wasn't this question closed instead of deleted (at the very least)? If this does get reopened, how could we prevent some user from deleting it again in the future?

If you can't help me with any of those questions, could I at least get the text from that question/answer since I found the information very useful?

Thanks!

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2 Answers 2

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It wasn't deleted, at least not directly; it was merged into this question: How do I change my profile picture, or avatar?

Yes, this link-breaking behavior is not terribly user-friendly - even 10k users can't immediately tell what happened, since your original question was hard-deleted - no end-user traces of it remain.

I've updated the FAQ to correct the breakage. If you'd like to avoid this sort of confusion in the future, vote here for justice.

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  • Thanks for the explanation, I was worried that the time I spent and the contributions were lost. This is definitely not user friendly.
    – Senseful
    Commented Jun 9, 2010 at 0:19
  • Could I get the Question text too by any chance or is it permanently deleted?
    – Senseful
    Commented Jun 9, 2010 at 0:20
  • @ea: can't help you there, I'm afraid. Even Google can't find it. Merges are brutal...
    – Shog9
    Commented Jun 9, 2010 at 0:21
  • @Shog9: No problem, I appreciate your help!
    – Senseful
    Commented Jun 9, 2010 at 0:23
  • @ea: one more thing: you should probably edit your answer's contents into the accepted answer now, so folks can get all the juicy details without too much scrolling. Then flag & ask a moderator to add the faq tag...
    – Shog9
    Commented Jun 9, 2010 at 0:25
  • @Shog9: Done, and thanks for fixing my edits. The faq tag was added by Jeff a few hours ago!
    – Senseful
    Commented Jun 9, 2010 at 6:13
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Question merging is now handled in a much saner way:

https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/06/improved-question-merging/

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