Set up an archive for legendary deleted questions

Question

up vote 59 down vote favorite

12

A number of highly upvoted "fun" questions were recently deleted.

Examples:

The "Wedding Cake" question (10k+)
The "Worst UI" question (10k+)
The original Boat Programming question (Deleted ages ago, there is apparently no active mirror)
Best comment in source code
The Non-programming books question

While I can respect that decision - most of those contributions don't have "lasting value" in the sense of the law - you can't just throw them away. They contain brilliant ideas, humour, some strokes of genius, and show what rampant creativity and artfulness is present in the programming community.

I request that these questions be archived in their entirety somewhere as static HTML. I'm sure the community will be willing to do the work but there should be a storage location for this that isn't dependent on people's private hosting arrangements and breaks after a few years. Ideally, that location would be provided by Stack Overflow.

discussion feature-request status-declined deleted-questions

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edited Sep 5 '12 at 22:28

Lance Roberts
40.5k674192

asked Dec 25 '10 at 12:40

Pekka 웃
51.3k20204432

2

At the very least, why not reopen and migrate to P.SE? No harm done there... – Corey Dec 25 '10 at 12:51

3

@Corey as far as I followed the discussion, they are not automatically welcome on P.SE either - with good reason, looking at the quality and seriousness the contributions have developed there. I can live with that, but this stuff should really be stored somewhere – Pekka 웃 Dec 25 '10 at 12:54

2

As an aside: until today, I really didn't know that P.SE did have the serious content like it does. That's my bad: I totally ignored semi-recent posts about P.SE, and I truly thought that fun questions would be welcome there. Seeing @Corey's comment, I guess I'm not the only one not knowing what P.SE is about. Doesn't that imply that many new questions might be erroneously migrated to P.SE...? – Arjan Dec 25 '10 at 13:06

(Not the original link, but: kaeding.name/articles/2009/05/01/programming-at-sea) – Arjan Dec 25 '10 at 13:08

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@Arjan cheers! The broken image links in the blog post also illustrate my point: This has to be hosted somewhere reliable. Re Programmers.SE: Fun questions may quite possibly get unfairly migrated there! Although they seem to be doing all right. – Pekka 웃 Dec 25 '10 at 13:19

1

As for reliability: the whole thing was hosted at www.mattmcdole.com/boat/ for some time too. Not there anymore. I guess the missing images are unrelated, but surely are a future problem for all images. Can we have some tools to handle link rot? partly mentions that too. – Arjan Dec 25 '10 at 13:27

Does anyone know of an Area 51 proposal that would be a suitable place for these questions? – Bill the Lizard♦ Dec 25 '10 at 15:13

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@Bill that's an interesting idea. I still tend to favour a static HTML archive because it allows you to retain the look, feel and layout of the site at the time the question was deleted. However, a special SE site would arguably be much more convenient in the long run – Pekka 웃 Dec 25 '10 at 16:03

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The boat programming question was, sadly, hard-deleted. There is no link for it. – Aarobot Dec 25 '10 at 16:39

14

+1 nice idea. Deleting those questions was an enormous mistake; it's part of the history of this community with a lot of social value (especially the boat one, cited in the #51 podcast). I don't really understand that politics, it does not make sense to me. There are plenty of other useless crappy questions to delete out there, why targeting the top voted ones? – systempuntoout Dec 26 '10 at 17:45

@Pekka do you have the complete list of killed questions? – systempuntoout Dec 29 '10 at 11:07

@system no. I've decided to set up a static archive in the coming weeks (I've made a sketch already and spoken to Github about hosting) I thought I'd start a question asking for links then. – Pekka 웃 Dec 29 '10 at 11:09

@Pekka Cool! I thought to host them on StackPrinter.com with a small section dedicated to them. I've already have the cartoon question in the db cache for example. If you are good with github, I will wait and see. – systempuntoout Dec 29 '10 at 11:55

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Elsewhere on meta, I just ran into a t-shirt about programming at sea.... :-) – Arjan Jan 13 '11 at 10:56

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@system FYI Building an archive of deleted questions – Pekka 웃 Feb 13 '12 at 21:04

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Answer 1

up vote 12 down vote

For what it's worth, I have set up a deleted questions section on StackPrinter.

Those questions were cached on datastore before the deletion so I can still serve them from db.
I have cached a lot of other endangered questions (comments here) that when deleted, will automatically pop up in that list.

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edited Feb 14 '11 at 11:37

answered Jan 2 '11 at 0:02

systempuntoout
2,55312145

Thank you for the "deleted questions" list. Could you cache all popular closed question to preserve the legacy? There is a policy that "unless a question has some chance to be considered for reopening, it should be deleted" and deleted questions are not included in the datadump. – J.F. Sebastian Mar 2 '12 at 18:22

Answer 2

up vote 2 down vote

We do have the Deleted Questions Archive for 10ks. I'm not really excited about most of the questions you listed, but it's CW so you can add to it as you see fit.

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answered Dec 25 '10 at 18:48

Lance Roberts
40.5k674192

I mean a public archive, but thanks for the hint anyway! Didn't know this. – Pekka 웃 Dec 25 '10 at 19:32

Answer 3

up vote 0 down vote

~~Another site mirrored some of the questions, minus comments:~~

~~Worst UI example.com/Question/1-238177~~

~~Wedding Cake example.com/Question/1-686216~~

The boating question was before StackOverflow became as popular and it isn't mirrored there.

EDIT: Well, it seems to mirror even the deletions, so these are not available there either.

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edited Feb 27 '11 at 21:55

answered Jan 2 '11 at 15:18

richq
384213

fine to share the links, but avoid linking to efreedom directly, though – Jeff Atwood♦ Jan 3 '11 at 8:35

Answer 4

up vote 0 down vote

Other.SE

I proposed other.stackexchange.com here, which could house these types of questions, without 'reducing the quality' of the other SE sites (an argument with which I disagree). If moderators and the overall community is going to say 'this isn't welcome here', then let's make a place where it IS welcome.

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answered May 5 '12 at 10:26

Ehryk
1232

Answer 5

up vote -1 down vote

These questions exist in the creative commons data dumps for previous months; they should already be mirrored a bunch of places. Feel free to set up another mirror under the terms of the creative commons license as you see fit.

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answered Dec 28 '10 at 13:11

Jeff Atwood♦
215k565791005

1

I have no problem with doing the work to set up the static pages, but the long-term hosting should be done somewhere independent from private arrangements and changes. Could SO provide a small space for that somewhere? – Pekka 웃 Dec 28 '10 at 13:18

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-1: those questions are your responsibility. First solve the problem of where those questions should go (for instance, in some kind of "outcast.stackexchange.com" where all migrated questions are automatically locked, and tagged with the name of their site of origin), and then delete whatever question you want. Again, simply delete them and say to the community "go fetch and do it yourself", just because after more than a year, you don't feel like seeing those questions anymore... that doesn't strike me as in line with "make the Internet a better place". – VonC Dec 28 '10 at 17:24

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-1: totally agree with @VonC. People do care about those questions, really, and deletion is the worst cure to the problem. Those questions deserve a better place to stay, they have real value and suggesting to set up a mirror to Pekka, although could be a solution, is not fair. I'm aware that running this community is stressful and it's difficult to satisfy everyone but, please, reconsider those deletions and when you have some spare time, think about a better place for those sweet questions. Thanks :) – systempuntoout Dec 28 '10 at 21:26

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@system I did think about a sweet place for them, in the bitbucket. – Jeff Atwood♦ Dec 29 '10 at 1:54

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@VonC: How would you like it if a group of 500 people you barely know all scrawled graffiti on your living room, and then after you finally finished cleaning it up, told you that it was your responsibility to find a better place for the graffiti within your home, preferably near a window where everybody can see it? It's not a problem for Jeff to solve; if the question is so important to any of you then you can mirror it yourself. – Aarobot Jan 2 '11 at 16:17

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@Arabot: there are several flaws in your reasoning. One, if this was such a dump, I would have cut short said "steaming mound" much sooner. Two, you are assuming those dumps have no value whatsoever. That is correct (for SO), but incorrect for the vast number of people who took the time to register, contribute, upvote and favorite those questions. For them, and the thousands of viewers, those questions (while not suited for what SO stands for today) are not without value. – VonC Jan 2 '11 at 16:27

2

@Arabot: In this context (long history plus the fact SO has taken advantage in the beginning from the traffic generated by those questions), I would argue that simply coming in after 2 years and deleting those popular questions, without any other solution that to say "if you really want them, go fetch the content in public dump and mirrors (for images)" is not a sensible solution. But I won't argue it is an efficient one. "Be smart and get things done" I guess;) – VonC Jan 2 '11 at 16:28

1

Building an archive of deleted questions – Pekka 웃 Feb 13 '12 at 20:52

Set up an archive for legendary deleted questions

5 Answers

Other.SE

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