# Wrong answer count for questions with deleted answers

There is a slightly annoying new feature/bug that I first noticed one or two days ago and seems related to joriki's question wrong answer count after an answer was deleted and undeleted

For instance, I see an answer count of $7$ answers on How to show $e^{e^{e^{79}}}$ is not an integer while there are only three answers plus four deleted ones. Now these four deleted answers are nothing but noise and I don't see the reason of counting them, or if they are counted I'd prefer seeing something like: 3 answers (+ 4 deleted answers).

The question Measure of $R_d \times \{0\}$ only has GEdgar's answer and again a deleted one and I see this:

(The white rectangle is there because I edited out the "user card" of the poster of the deleted answer)

If I'm not logged in, the system behaves as it should and displays that there is only one answer:

I don't think this only is "denormalization" (see Jeff's answer to joriki's question) as old posts with no activity in a long time display the same behavior.

• @joriki: Freudian slip, I guess :) I'm so used to your answering questions... – t.b. Aug 9 '11 at 21:47
• Funny you should say that -- I was going to ask a question on meta about asking questions tomorrow :-) – joriki Aug 9 '11 at 21:51
• Dear Theo, Good question! (I just noticed this yesterday, I think, and was similarly puzzled.) Best wishes, – Matt E Aug 10 '11 at 2:34

## 1 Answer

This is by design -- as a user with >= 10k rep, you can see deleted answers. So from your perspective, there are indeed two answers. One of them happens to be deleted.

• Hm. Thanks, I feared that. But I don't think there are two answers. There is one answer and one piece of noise. But is this new? I don't think I've seen that before and it's been a while that I have >10K. – t.b. Aug 10 '11 at 1:56
• there were bugs in the old implementation based on using an incorrect answer count, actually -- that got fixed. – Jeff Atwood Aug 10 '11 at 1:57
• Okay, then I probably have no choice but to live with it :) Will manage that, I think. Thanks for the quick response and sorry to have wasted your time with such a triviality. – t.b. Aug 10 '11 at 2:01
• Hardly a triviality, I would rather have a community that cares too much than not at all! – Jeff Atwood Aug 10 '11 at 2:18
• @Jeff: would it be much work to change the display for 10K users to read X answers (Y deleted) or something like that? – Willie Wong Aug 11 '11 at 18:21
• Echoing Willie's request: would it take too much overhead for the software to count how many deleted answers are there in the question and display this accordingly? – J. M. isn't a mathematician Aug 24 '11 at 5:35