3

A user is experiencing high anxiety about an academic issue. He has expressed clearly, multiple times, that (a) he is in agreement with everyone who has tried to reassure him, but that (b) his anxiety persists and is acute. He states that he has posted his question and deleted it twice and now here it is again for the third time: Is it unethical of me and can I get in trouble if a professor passes me based on an oral exam without attending class?

I wrote an answer which has disappeared along with one of his deletions. I would like to recover this answer and repost it at his new question.

Can the moderators merge his multiple threads, so my answer would show up? (I'm not sure if "thread" is the correct word.)

Or should I just have flagged his question to try to do this? I don't think my request would fit in the flag box....

3
  • I now think a flag would have been a good idea. I'm learning, slowly but surely.
    – aparente001
    Commented Oct 27, 2016 at 5:19
  • (Posting on meta to learn how to find your own deleted posts was exactly the right thing to do - and has the added benefit that other users can read this meta post and learn how to do this, too.)
    – ff524 Mod
    Commented Oct 27, 2016 at 5:39
  • @ff524 - apparently, a little slower than I thought -- but I'll get there!
    – aparente001
    Commented Oct 28, 2016 at 0:26

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
7

Here is your answer. You have enough reputation to see deleted posts so you can copy and paste it yourself into the new question.

In general: you can see your own deleted recent answers on your profile page, and if you have more than 10k rep, you can use the deleted:1 search operator to see your own deleted questions and answers.

1
  • Much appreciated!
    – aparente001
    Commented Oct 27, 2016 at 5:17
2

One thing you could have raised a flag for would be for the questions to be merged. In general, deleting and reposting questions is frowned upon. Users sometimes do this to avoid loss of reputation from down votes or to bring more attention to the question. In this case, it seems like the user is simply anxious. Which would bring your deleted answer back. That said, the questions are long and you answer is the only answer. When I looked, I decided not to invest the time sorting it out. Another option would be to undelete the old version and close the new one as a duplicate. These options seem like they might further stress out the user with little benefit to us as a community.

1
  • Merging is useful when there are multiple answers on both questions, when there's an answer from someone who doesn't have an Academia account (as can happen when a question is migrated and also cross-posted), or if the answers have votes that the owners don't want to lose (although if the answers were upvoted, the question couldn't have been deleted by the owner.) But in other cases, where there's no benefit to merging, I strongly encourage users who can take care of this themself with copy+paste to do so rather than raise a flag.
    – ff524 Mod
    Commented Oct 27, 2016 at 15:05

You must log in to answer this question.

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