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@Dom

Twice the answer "Staind - It's been awhile" has been deleted from Sad 90's alt rock video from MTV - trashed room ends up on fire. It seems quite likely this is the answer the original poster was seeking. Were the answers removed just for being short? Wouldn't it be better to edit them to add a link and a little more information, or, even better, to leave a comment explaining how the answer can be improved? I can't imagine anything more discouraging to a new user than having a correct answer deleted without comment.

Also, I thought about posting my own, longer version of the same answer, but that seems a little unfair to the users who originally posted it. What is the right thing to do in this case? Can we make it a community answer?

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  • It had a score of -2 and had not been in the low quality queue for a while. We really need to fix our policy on these questions and answers as they generate a ton of low quality flags for that reason and most answers are just a rando guess that nobody can verify but the OP which is completely backwards for the SE modle.
    – Dom Mod
    May 25, 2016 at 5:24
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    @Dom The question had a fair number of solid identifying details, and the video referenced in the answer matched all of those, even though the answer didn't make that clear. Given that we're a struggling SE with a limited user base, and that the ID questions are among our most popular, I think the best practice is to leave some feedback encouraging improvement versus commentless deletion.
    – Chris Sunami
    May 25, 2016 at 13:33
  • It's not going to get any better until we hash this out. Me and the other mods try our best to clear the queues every few weeks because nobody else does it and most of the time when we do this we don't have much guidance by the community on what to do as we've kept pushing off issues like this.
    – Dom Mod
    May 25, 2016 at 13:42
  • @Dom In response to a comment by Bebs, I wanted to know if we can either get the original answer undeleted, and my new content edited into it, or my answer converted into a community wiki answer?
    – Chris Sunami
    Jul 18, 2017 at 17:57
  • I don't see any reason to undelete the answer and we are still no closer to a policy on questions like this nor know if it was even the answer. There are two other suggestions as an answer and 1 as a comment. The only person who can tell us is the OP who has not come back for the question. Honestly, IMO the question is now at a state where even if we think that's the answer, we'll never know for sure because the OP has to tell us. This does not make sense for a valid question on a Q&A site.
    – Dom Mod
    Jul 18, 2017 at 18:28

1 Answer 1

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I was away for a few days but I will say we often get flags for answers that are too short. I tend to leave them open and put a response on the answer to flesh it out a bit. I'm not sure what happened here, but if the answer is correct (or at least not 100% wrong) it should have been left alone. There's no reason to delete a correct answer just because it's too short.

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