25

I had a chosen answer with a significant amount of upvotes and bounty awarded. Months after answering, the question disappeared and I lost the 400 rep.

I am not in this for the points, but when you get close to a certain rep threshold you get excited for that certain privilege and it pushes you to participate more. To lose 1/4 of my rep instantly has made me a little bitter to the whole experience.

Why are people able to delete questions months afterwards when there are numerous answers with many votes? Also, why should I lose the reputation for an answer that many found helpful. It was no less helpful during that period of time, and would have remained helpful had the question not been deleted.

Edit:

Thanks to Bill the Lizard's answer I see that the question was migrated to Programmer's SE.

While it's nice to know that it wasn't deleted it still leaves me with the same problem in the end. I was 100 rep from being able to edit and then it was ripped away due to (imo) over-organization. The question was on SO for months. Would be nice to just have a central rep repository rather than splitting it between a dozen similarly themed sites.

2
  • 4
    Which is the question in question? (pardon the pun) Commented Mar 4, 2011 at 19:26
  • Bill found it (below). I could not even see it in my list due to my rep and its migration.
    – Gregg B
    Commented Mar 4, 2011 at 19:38

2 Answers 2

11

<sidestep>The question was migrated to Programmers. How do I get started with HTML5 when I come from a Flash background?

If you associate your accounts, you'll gain the rep on that site.</sidestep>

8
  • Thanks for that. Is there a system in place to let me know when this happens? The question was no longer listed for me, so as far as I could tell it was deleted.
    – Gregg B
    Commented Mar 4, 2011 at 19:31
  • 1
    @Grillz: That question was migrated on Feb 2, and deleted on Feb 5. That's abnormally fast. Normally the question will be around with a link to the migrated site for a lot longer. But no, unfortunately there's no warning system in place. (You can suggest it, but that would be a ton of notifications to send out.) Commented Mar 4, 2011 at 19:35
  • Understood. That does make sense - I appreciate your help.
    – Gregg B
    Commented Mar 4, 2011 at 19:37
  • 1
    @Grillz, the question owner is notified about migrations. I'm not sure if other participants want such notifications too, but if you do: why not propose that enhancement?
    – Arjan
    Commented Mar 4, 2011 at 20:07
  • @Arjan: Nice, I didn't know about that suggestion, much less the implementation. Thanks. Commented Mar 4, 2011 at 20:15
  • @Arjan Good point.
    – Gregg B
    Commented Mar 4, 2011 at 20:29
  • And done meta.stackexchange.com/questions/81738/…
    – Gregg B
    Commented Mar 4, 2011 at 20:40
  • this still doesn't solve the problem, It's great that he didn't loose his reputation entirely, but what if it actually had been deleted? Then what? His point is still valid, but it hasn't yet been answered!
    – Ephraim
    Commented Apr 25, 2012 at 22:59
2

This just happened to me today, on my first question on Meta:

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/149104/profanity-on-blog-stackoverflow-com

For the record, I used a question to report profanity. It was upvoted to +18, got an answer that also was upvoted to +3, that I accepted. The profanity in question was fixed, so this was pointing at a real problem.

And now the question is simply gone, as well as the associated rep.

3
  • 1
    There was guy earlier on in SO that (when pulled up about his poor accept rate) just went through all his questions and deleted half of them rather than accept some of the answers. IMO you shouldn't be able to delete a question if there are upvoted answers.
    – McNab
    Commented Oct 2, 2012 at 22:35
  • 1
    @mcnab AFAIK, you cannot, so long as one answer has an upvote. Commented Oct 2, 2012 at 23:57
  • Next time you want to report stuff on the blog, just drop into The Assembly.
    – TRiG
    Commented Feb 14, 2014 at 15:47

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .