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Does anyone know how many questions has Roomba deleted on this SE so far? I'm also curious how many questions are expected to be deleted in the coming months.

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    There are 904 deleted questions on the site right now, 437 of them scoring <= -1. A quick survey of positively scoring deleted questions says that most of them are either self-deletions or mod-deletions, the latter mostly spam seeds. Also FYI, the Roomba has been active since day one. I think its first victim was softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/q/97/46.
    – Undo
    Mar 9, 2015 at 18:51

1 Answer 1

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I checked all the deleted, non-closed questions from the period from 2014-02-14 through 2014-03-15 and found only one that has been deleted by the one-year rule (at least 365 days old, no answer, score of 0 (or 1 if the owner is deleted), at most 1 comment, and low views):

That's out of 45 questions posted in that time period and deleted but not closed. Most of them were deleted by the asker, a couple by moderators, a few (I didn't count) by the 30-day rule rule which deletes unanswered questions with a negative score (this rule has also deleted more recent questions).

As filtering these questions is tedious (moderators can search for deleted questions but there's no easy way to automate the filtering by deletion reason) I do not intend to maintain this list as time marches on.

You can find questions at risk of deletion on the Data Explorer. You need to look for them before they get deleted since deleted questions are removed from the Data Explorer (which is updated weekly). I'll let someone more fluent in SQL than me compose an appropriate query or someone better at searching SEDE post a link to an existing one.

As much as I dislike the automatic deletion of questions that aren't closed, we have far more pressing things to do on the site, such as answering the questions that people do care about as demonstrated through views and upvotes.

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    Thanks. How do you see the list of all the deleted, non-closed questions from the period from 2014-02-14 through 2014-03-15? Mar 9, 2015 at 19:47
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    @FranckDernoncourt It's a moderator-only search. Mar 9, 2015 at 19:50
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    The Data Explorer query: data.stackexchange.com/softwarerecs/query/284387/…
    – Nicolas Raoul Mod
    Nov 4, 2015 at 8:45
  • @NicolasRaoul I tried that query, and most of the enitres have a blank OwnerDisplayName, but when you click on the question, it shows that the author. Any idea what, if anything, is broken? Feb 25, 2016 at 22:24
  • @RockPaperLizard Seems that OwnerDisplayName is only filled in if the question has no owner. This happens when the account who is the post's author is deleted. This also happens on incoming migrations when the author doesn't have an account on the site (and the field isn't blanked if the author later creates an account and has the post associated to them). Feb 25, 2016 at 22:28
  • @Gilles Thanks. So you can only see the author's name, when the author no longer has an account? Seems backwards to what would be most useful. For example, how do I quickly check if any of your or my questions are about to deleted by Roomba? Feb 25, 2016 at 22:33
  • @RockPaperLizard Check the OwnerUserId column. That's the reliable way of identifying users, unlike names which are not unique. For visual convenience, if you put user IDs in a column and name that column User Link, the user IDs will be pretty printed as user names and linked to the account (like Post Link for posts). Feb 25, 2016 at 22:40
  • @Gilles That sounds great, thanks. I'm probably missing something obvious, but how do you name a column from within a query? Can you fork this to make it work? data.stackexchange.com/softwarerecs/query/284387/… Feb 25, 2016 at 22:43
  • @RockPaperLizard change OwnerUserId to OwnerUserId as [User Link] Feb 25, 2016 at 22:47

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