up vote 7 down vote favorite
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In my opinion this question should be preserved even though it is bad, because it has nice answers worthy of preserving. To pick one example, I personally found idea of sleep sort to be rather enlightening in the thinking-outside-of-the-box kind of way.

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The question has been locked for the time being until such time as the community decides whether deletion is acceptable or not. – World Engineer♦ Apr 3 at 21:45
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To answer your original question -- It's super annoying; I used to hate that. Being able to see deleted questions is one of the perks I love from being a 10k+ user. – GlenH7 Apr 4 at 11:01
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The revision history is enough for people to see past versions of your question, no point in preserving them otherwise. – Yannis Rizos♦ Apr 4 at 14:10

3 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

The question is extremely off topic, by virtue of being a pointless poll and I can't really find any reason why we shouldn't delete it. Considering its age, it isn't really a question that qualifies for a historical lock:

  • It's score isn't really impressive for a fun poll,
  • Most of the answers are... not even interesting,
  • No inbound links to speak of,
  • Very low views.

If you really think it should be preserved, then you have a great option, turn it into a blog post for our community blog. It might take a bit of work, but if you really love the question and its answers I'm sure you're up for it (and I'm also sure others will help).

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For what it's worth, anybody reading this (including me, the annoyed OP, see edit history of the question) has now had a chance to read it. Deleting it now is less of a loss, than the earlier deletion which disrupted my reading. – hyde Apr 4 at 14:35
@hyde I'm not going to delete until a sense of consensus is reached here, but please consider my suggestion of turning it into a blog post. It's really the better option for preserving those old questions that aren't exactly spectacular. The world will most definitely not end if we place a historical lock on it, but I wouldn't want to encourage locking everything that doesn't fit, it's an option that's reserved for the very high end of the quality spectrum (of closed questions). – Yannis Rizos♦ Apr 4 at 14:39
Offtopic: this has undoubtedly been discussed many times at meta.SO, but I am in the camp which thinks deleting stuff from the Internet and creating dead links is bad, and alternative solution (say, hide question from all related lists etc, remove favorites, possibly even deny new SE questions and answers from including a direct link, just allow old links at SE and elsewhere to still work) would serve SE well, also indirectly by reducing all this bitching about deleted stuff. – hyde Apr 4 at 14:48
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@hyde Archiving old questions has been indeed suggested numerous times on MSO, and has been declined every single time. You can't really blame SE for not wanting to host (and be associated with) content that don't fit their guidelines, and honestly I've never actually seen a significant impact from deleting questions. Lots of bitching, certainly, but no actual impact. That said, personally I'd like an archive, especially one that would work like you describe. But I'm not going to pay the SE devs to build me one ;) – Yannis Rizos♦ Apr 4 at 14:50
Agreed on the not really worthy of a historical lock. Agreed that it is not constructive and should be closed. Disagree that it should be deleted though. Agree that it could make a decent blog post as well. As I've offered to help clean it up; I'll offer to merge to blog post. However, I have commitments that will keep me from starting the conversion for a few weeks. – GlenH7 Apr 5 at 14:59
up vote 5 down vote

The Question should stay locked. It is historically significant despite being a polling question.

Despite a few smart-aleck answers, there are some good answers in there. Most of the suggested algorithms are "non-traditional" which can be useful for learning from when a project has unique requirements. It's not mentioned in the answer, but BCrypt is an example algorithm that's been intentionally designed to run slower in order to hinder brute force attack.

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I'll volunteer to clean up the smart-aleck answers in that question if we decide to keep it. Ping me once a decision has been made. – GlenH7 Apr 4 at 10:59
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I wish more leeway were given to questions that are not "correct" but are interesting or provoke interesting responses. Including whimsical discussions (assuming they have some element of programming interest). It is not as if Programmers is overflowing with questions. Allowing a bit more wide-ranging questions would give the site more character, in my opinion. – dan1111 Apr 4 at 13:48
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Nothing historically significant about the question I'm afraid. +22 question with 1500 views and no inbound links to speak of, this is a meh question at best. Historically significant doesn't mean "old question I personally like", it's a compromise for truly stellar questions that don't belong to the site for whatever reason (more details here). – Yannis Rizos♦ Apr 4 at 14:13
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@dan1111 Hey, you probably don't know that but this site started out exactly as a site where more leeway were given to questions that are not "correct" but are interesting or provoke interesting responses. And it soon turned into a crapfest, and reached a "get serious, or else" point. Fortunately now we have a pretty awesome chat room and a community blog, and we can have all the fun we want there, while keeping the main site as close to its goal (a very high quality canonical resource) as possible. – Yannis Rizos♦ Apr 4 at 14:29
@YannisRizos, thanks for the background information. – dan1111 Apr 4 at 15:22
up vote -3 down vote

The Question should be deleted, it is a bad question and we should all feel bad.

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