# Deleted questions (or deleted user accounts)

Over the last year or two I have encountered a couple of times the situation that I answered a (possibly badly formulated) question on a topic I am expert in (the [gap] tag) as I felt that the question, though badly formulated, was not obvious and a response might help other users later on. A while later the answer disappeared as the user deleted the question (or even their whole account), making the effort on responding disappear. (Often these were users with very low reputation, they might have created throwaway accounts.) Is there a way to make answers in such cases survive (or rescue them)?

• The question can be undeleted by users with enough reputation. – Matt Samuel Dec 5 '19 at 21:42
• You are only 1698 reputation away from being able to see deleted questions so. – Don Thousand Dec 5 '19 at 21:43
• As mentioned in the comments, if it the answer wasn't older than 60 days, you can't find it through your profile (through "deleted recent answers). More details can be found here: Is there any way to see my deleted questions or answers? As I have mentioned in an answer to another question it is possible to get list of all deleted questions in some specific tag. For tag which does not have too many questions, it might be possible to check all of them manually. – Martin Sleziak Dec 6 '19 at 6:41
• For example, if you check questions tagged (gap) which were deleted this year, so far there was less than 40 of them. If you click on those links, you'll still be able to see those of them where you posted an answer - even if you're below 10k. (And 10k+ users can see all of them.) It is a bit cumbersome having to go through the list one-by-one, but if it is not too long, this is still doable. – Martin Sleziak Dec 6 '19 at 6:43
• I will also leave a link to this previous questions, since it is primarily concerned by self-deletions: Is there need to patrol for deleted questions? – Martin Sleziak Dec 6 '19 at 6:46
• It's widely agreed that users should not delete their posts after receiving an answer. If you post an answer to math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/28692/… pointing out that a user has acted this way, and asking people to vote to undelete, there's a good chance you will be treated sympathetically. – Gerry Myerson Dec 6 '19 at 10:09

When you've got enough reputation that you can see deleted content, type the following command into the search bar: [gap] deleted:yes.