Do you find it irritating to have a question removed after you've answered it?

And now this question has been moved to Meta—a land of the lost I cannot easily access on my iPhone. Not happy!

Nope. It’s a small price to pay.

Admittedly, I have found this a bit annoying. Sometimes, though, the mods leave a question up if there are enough helpful and well thought out answers.

I will respectfully disagree with referring to the meta section as a land of the lost. It encourages people to ask questions about the site without cluttering up the front page. Also, andrew has said he is working on a way to make the meta tab accessible from iPhones,

@KatawaGrey – good to know about the meta tab forthcoming for iPhone. Thanks.

Concerning questions removed for editing, or for whatever other reason, I wish there was a separate tab for those. Even if the response section was temporarily closed, it would at least allow posters to see what has already been written. It would also give jellies a chance to see examples of “what not to write.”

pat, pat. I hope you feel better :)

Yes, I have had that feeling.

@liminal – I do feel better. Any suggestions for this concern?

@prolificus: Have you PM’d andrew, ben or tim? I have heard at least one other user suggesting this but our creators have been reticent to do so. I think the idea has merit but it wold really need to be smoothed out. I’m worried that if it was added, there would be a huge number of disgruntled users wondering why this or that question was moderated.

@prolificus I haven’t really given it much thought. My experience has been along the lines of “Oh, I liked that conversation, oh well, moving on.”

It might be interesting for an automatic pm to be sent to all respondents that includes the conversation up until it was removed.

It happened to me today just after I edited an answer. My biggest anxiety came in the form of not being able to proof read my proof reading. I can be funny like that.

edit: and what KatawaGrey says.

@KatawaGrey – i’ve not pm’d any of those you’ve suggested.

Maybe there would be several disgruntled users. I wonder, though, if it could lead to self-improvement of the whole process—users could work with other users to edit questions so that they could be returned to the front page.

@prolificus: Andrew, ben, and tim run the site and augustlan is the manager. I would definitely suggest talking to any of these people about your concerns. I honestly think the issue is that it needs to be streamlined. You have some very valid points and if you presented your idea like that, then perhaps there would be something like what you’re talking about. I like what you’re thinking and I’m sure many other users would be interested in a feature like that.

I think Andrew raised this as a possibility a few months ago and got shot down. It wasn’t clear to many people exactly what he was proposing. Let me see if I can find that discussion with our search engine. ... Here’s the question that Andrew raised which is pertinent to this discussion.

@janbb I guess that was asked before I was here, and while I harbor no illusions that my opinion carries any weight, I like the idea.

I wouldn’t mind if questions that were pulled for spelling errors or vagueness or something along those lines were accessible somewhere on the site, but certainly not trolling questions and the like. Since only some moderated Qs would need to remain accessible, it would require yet another step of the moderators – sorting them into a ‘keep’ or ‘discard’ kind of thing.

For me, I’ve solved this concern by waiting a certain amount of time to make sure the question will pass before I answer. I’ve learned not to jump into answering right away if the question seems like it will be moderated.