I received a notification about a new answer to my question, but there are no answers
I received a notification saying that there's a new answer to my question:
But when I clicked it, I saw no answers. I can think of 2 possibilities about what happened:
- There wasn't an answer and the notification was incorrectly sent
- There was an answer but it was deleted before I clicked in the notification (and I guess I can't see deleted posts due to my low rep?)
In case 1, it's a bug.
In case 2, I'm not sure. It could be considered a bug, because there's no point in notifying me for something I can't see ("hey, there's a message for you, but you can't see it"). So perhaps the notification should be deleted (or there should be some indication that the answer was deleted, which would make the notification a little less confusing).
1 answer
Yeah, that's my fault.
I wrote up an answer and posted it, but I deleted it shortly afterwards (and later undeleted it . . . and then redeleted it). I did so because I've been extremely active on Scientific Speculation already - more so by far than any other user. That can be a double-edged sword; on the one hand, I'm trying to keep us at a reasonable rate of activity, so I've been asking questions on a regular basis. On the other, I don't want to dominate the site - and I don't want to discourage other folks, new users included, from posting answers to questions I've already answered. At our current (low) level of activity, that's still a risk.
Therefore, I decided to delete the answer, give the question some time and let other people take a crack at it, and then maybe undelete it in a day or so if nobody else had written one - completely forgetting that it would notify you. (For what it's worth, that's still my plan - I'll wait a few hours more. I hope that's okay with you.)
Sorry about the confusion and the inconvenience.
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