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I have some closed-and-then-auto-deleted questions that I've been working on improving. They have been deleted for long enough that I no longer see them on my user page.

Is there a way for me to find those questions? I think they still "exist" in some way, because links that used to point to them still work, like this one.

I've been doing more background research in the hope to get the quality to a good enough standard that the community will choose to undelete them (I'm not quite sure how that process works).

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The best way may be to search inside our chatroom, The Time Machine. Our Historian bot automatically link new questions to the chat feed as they appear, and this is preserved even when the post itself got deleted by community, barring moderator intervention in exceptional cases.

In fact, the bot link includes the author of the question, so you can find all questions you've posted with this query:

https://chat.stackexchange.com/search?q=capet&room=1560

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    Thanks a lot!!!
    – capet
    Dec 14, 2020 at 8:03
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Try this command as a search query:

user:27333 deleted:1 closed:0 is:question

(Only admins/mods can retry this exact command, the usernumber limits this to the original poster)

After you are convinced that your edits have improved the post to a reasonable quality, flag that post for 'mod attention' and ask for undeletion. That's the preferred way.

As long as a question is deleted, 'the community' is unable to help.

For 'the community' to cast undelete votes, 'the community' needs to see the post and read it. You may need to bring it to the attention of 'the community'. That may involve a meta-post highlighting that post and providing links to it, so that community members with a high enough privilege level can form an opinion on the merits or deficits, cast votes or provide more direct feedback on that post should it be necessary or perhaps more promising as 'fruitful'. This is a bit less preferred.

There is no guarantee that either method will work though.

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  • Thanks a lot!!!
    – capet
    Dec 14, 2020 at 3:22
  • Oops sorry, it looks like this actually isn't working for me. It is returning some of my questions but not the deleted ones, for some reason.
    – capet
    Dec 14, 2020 at 5:21
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    @capet Maybe I misunderstood the exact angle. Try again without closed:0(or with closed:1 ?) …
    – LаngLаngС
    Dec 14, 2020 at 12:54
  • Thanks @LangLangC, sorry for being confusing. This method is very interesting! I tried with four possible assignments of "deleted:" and "closed:"; for me, the "deleted:" doesn't seem to do anything and the "closed:" gives me either nothing (for closed:1) or my non-closed questions (for closed:0). Feels like there must be some way though, right?
    – capet
    Dec 14, 2020 at 15:14
  • You forgot step 0: Get 2k rep (on non betas: 10k). This search feature is part of the same privilege level that allows you to see other people’s deleted posts.
    – Laurel
    Mar 10, 2021 at 4:46

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