Deleted questions are showing up in intermittent fashion, and that is shaking me to my core. Won't you help?

November 20, 2007 4:10 PM

Dumb, probably-asked-before question about deleted questions.

I've just installed the greasemonkey "deleted threads" plug-in, and it's a terrible lot of fun. But while it behaves perfectly on the blue, on the green it is hit or miss.

For instance, this deleted thread is still there and viewable, while this one gives the "nothing to see here, move along" message. Both are displayed in exactly the same way by the greasemonkey script.

Does it have something to do with how/why the questions are deleted? Am I not holding my mouth correctly while clicking?

Just curious, really - I'm still excited about life either way.

posted by jbickers to Bugs at 4:10 PM (16 comments total)

The ones that say "nothing to see here, move along" are usually anonymous questions that haven't been posted yet.
posted by tepidmonkey at 4:15 PM on November 20, 2007

Just so. The greasemonkey script has trouble with askme because submitted-but-not-yet-approved anonymous questions reserve their thread id at submission time, creating a gap in the listings.

Actually deleted threads will, as you have seen, show up just dandy.
posted by cortex (staff) at 4:17 PM on November 20, 2007

Interesting. I hadn't thought of that, because I always assumed anonymous questions were just emailed directly to the mods (never really looked into them before). Thanks for assuaging the curiosity.
posted by jbickers at 4:19 PM on November 20, 2007

There's a rambly paragraph explaining the problem on the userscripts.org listing for the script. But cortex said it more succinctly.
posted by Plutor at 5:24 PM on November 20, 2007

Cortex: Not rambly.
posted by The Deej at 5:51 PM on November 20, 2007 [1 favorite]

AskMetafilter: Just curious, really - I'm still excited about life either way.
posted by finite at 6:42 PM on November 20, 2007 [1 favorite]

Wow - that script showed me how much deleting the admins really do around here. I had no idea that so much crap was posted on a daily basis.

So consider this a "good job admins!" post.
posted by chrisamiller at 8:04 PM on November 20, 2007

You might want to add an exclusion for this page. If you click on that with the script enabled it loads a couple hundred deleted notices and slows down your browser considerable. There are some other pages that do that but I can't remember what they are.
posted by puke & cry at 8:38 PM on November 20, 2007

Matt has in the past completely deleted AskMe questions resulting in the nothing to see here message from a formerly readable question so they aren't all anonymous queue questions.
posted by Mitheral at 11:09 PM on November 20, 2007

Is there any way to see a listing of deleted threads without greasemonkey?
posted by gfrobe at 1:22 AM on November 21, 2007

puke & cry: "You might want to add an exclusion for this page."

The script doesn't kick in on that page for me. Have you updated recently? Maybe you're using an old version with different rules.

gfrobe: There's always Deleted Thread, but I think it's still updated manually (but regularly) by puke & cry.
posted by Plutor at 3:40 AM on November 21, 2007

Matt has in the past completely deleted AskMe questions resulting in the nothing to see here message from a formerly readable question so they aren't all anonymous queue questions.

Ah, good point. On the other hand, it's a ratio at least a couple orders of magnitude wide, so practically speaking the nuke-from-orbits don't play into the day-to-day gappiness.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:36 AM on November 21, 2007

Looking at Deleted Thread, it amazes me how many people try to self-link. I had assumed it was a relatively rare infraction, but apparently not.
posted by winna at 9:21 AM on November 21, 2007

I feel like it's something that spikes now and then; we've had a few recently, but sometimes I'd say we go weeks without one. But that might just be mod-view compression of it all—time flies when you're banning asshats, and all that.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:30 AM on November 21, 2007

gfrobe: You can use the Deleted Thread Bookmarklet. Same issues with AskMe.
posted by ALongDecember at 11:29 AM on November 21, 2007

MetaTalk: Time flies when you're banning asshats
posted by deborah at 7:46 PM on November 21, 2007