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I may soon get enough reputation on Stack Overflow to see deleted posts. However, I don't want to see them! They probably were deleted for a good reason, and having them visible (e.g. while browsing through the answers for a question) is annoying. I got that feeling from another site where I have enough reputation to see deleted answers.

The pain is mostly (only?) about deleted answers; I don't remember seeing an annoying deleted question. But maybe these are annoying too (people with enough reputation will know).

Some users even try Self-vandalizing deleted answers to ease that pain for everyone.

Would it be good to not show the deleted posts by default, and provide some way for the users to "unhide" each post they want to see? Like show a small "unhide" button instead of the full answer.

(I am not making this into a [feature-request] because I don't have the details of the presentation that I want to suggest, just a general idea).

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  • If it helps, you won't see any posts deleted by spam/offensive flags unless you click through to their history. Commented Aug 26, 2015 at 23:51

1 Answer 1

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Deleted answers are at the bottom of the page (regardless of score), so when reading, once you see that pink background, you can stop -- you won't miss a non-deleted answer after that point.1

Posts that have been deleted via spam or offensive flags are replaced with placeholder text saying "this was deleted as spam or offensive", so you don't see the original there unless you click through.

You can only see deleted questions if you follow a link to them.

So all in all, you're pretty reasonably protected from having to look at bad answers already.

1 Assuming you aren't sorting answers by age, where this doesn't apply. Also, if an answer is deleted while you're viewing the page, i.e. you cast the last delete vote, it doesn't move, but when you refresh the page it'll be at the bottom.

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