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I asked a question about a film I am looking for and I logged in today to find that it has vanished.

what happened to it? why was i not notified that it was removed?

how can i recover my deleted question? i spent a lot of time writing it and investigating it, now that it's gone i feel like i've been robbed, how can i get it back?

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I'm not entirely sure what the relationship between OnlineDevs.com and StackExchange is, but I do know that OnlineDevs.com reposts StackExchange questions (and answers).

So, using a bit of Google, I was able to locate your original question "Blue ant eater people that turn into flying whales either when they die or for some other reason" on the OnlineDevs.com site at this link.

The full text of your question is available there, along with the answer that had been given (no context in terms of users or anything though).

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    If this answer is solely about viewing the original question, then that link is not necessary since the question here is also readable for him, I have also provided a link to the original question in the meta question. The asker (as well as any 10k user) should be able to view that.
    – Napoleon Wilson Mod
    Commented Mar 11, 2015 at 15:39
  • @NapoleonWilson The way he phrased it, sounded like he couldn't find his question text anymore and wanted to recover it (he linked to the question himself too). Sorry if I misunderstood.
    – Trish Ling
    Commented Mar 11, 2015 at 15:40
  • OnlineDevs is one of many sites that crawls metadata, sucks in the good stuff, and then sprinkles in PPI (Pay Per Impression) ads so they can make money. Whenever I google an IT question I always avoid any hit from BigResource, which is basically just a clickfarm that runs you in circles, and each link you click on that you think takes you to the answer only contains more links and a bunch of PPI ads.
    – Johnny Bones
    Commented Mar 13, 2015 at 19:46
  • Thanks Trish. My original question didn't have a link, someone edited it in for me. I never realised that my posts were being copied onto other sites.
    – user7610
    Commented Mar 16, 2015 at 22:48
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The policy on identification questions is, that they are eligible for deletion when they don't have any upvoted or accepted answers and remained inactive for 4 weeks, as described in the help center and this meta post. Since this policy has recently been updated as described in this meta discussion, there was a recent cleanup session where questions that are thus deletable were acted upon accordingly, yours was one of them.

You might feel like having been robbed and I see that you have put much detail into the question, but such are the rules of this site and they are necessary to tackle the long-term negative impact those inactive identification questions have on the site. If however, you have any new insights or updates to your question that may provide new possibilities for answering, you can add them in and it might get undeleted.

However, I wonder why you haven't been notified of the removal. I thought a deleted question would automatically trigger a user notification. If not, then I see why you were surprised. Thanks for bringing this to notice.

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    Once my question also got deleted on the same condition and i didn't got any notification.
    – Ankit Sharma Mod
    Commented Mar 12, 2015 at 6:47
  • The same thing happened to my question (and it was deleted by you, no less!) but it's good to know the reason why. I also did not see any notification of it having been deleted, and discovered it had been deleted by accident (i did a Google search and found it mentioned in the link but not on the page it linked to; went into Google's cache to find the original question).
    – Michael
    Commented Aug 4, 2017 at 20:44

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