Yesterday I answered an interesting question on communication complexity (extending the communication protocol for equality so that it handles at most one error). The question has since vanished without trace – presumably self-deleted. My hypothesis is that it's a case of cheating.
I asked about this kind of behavior previously. Apparently only moderators can help. What I am wondering is
Why can't I see an answer that I myself wrote?
If the answer was recent and is deleted, try following the “deleted recent answers” link at the bottom of the “Answers” tab in your profile. The URL is https://cs.stackexchange.com/users/recently-deleted-answers/ followed by your numerical user ID.
I'm not sure what the exact criteria for inclusion are. The answer must be recent (60 days if I remember correctly), not just recently deleted. Some cases may be excluded (e.g. if the question was flagged as spam? Or the user account asking the question was deleted for rule violations?).
As a reminder, the rationale for allowing deletion is: if a question has a single answer with no upvote, the answer might be something boring and non-teachable such as “you made a typo”, hence the asker is allowed to delete their question. A non-closed question with an upvoted answer or with more than one answer can only be deleted by moderators.
By design, there is never any notification when a post is deleted. That's to avoid people systematically complaining about justified deletions. Unjustified deletions are rare, but this is a case of unjustified deletion and it's unfortunate that it got caught in the wheels.
If you do notice this happening and you think your answer is worth preserving, please flag and request undeletion as explained in Self-deleted questions . I have undeleted this one.
