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This search from Deleting closed questions with no answers has really helped us delete a lot of the crap that has been sitting in closed-but-not-deleted limbo and has helped to raise the percent of questions answered of SF by a percentage point or two.

Now, there are at least a full page at the back of this search that are posts that have been merged. Normal users can not delete a merged post even though the original has no relevant content anymore. Is this something that moderators can delete or do they have to be preserved for some reason?

If they have to be preserved, does anyone know of a search term to hide merged questions from that list? merged:0 doesn't work.

Side note: If you have delete votes, PLEASE help us delete all of the crap in here!

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    Or at least change the "closed" in the title to "merged" so they're easily identified in the search results?
    – Chris S
    Commented Dec 22, 2011 at 16:27
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    I'm all for re-titling. Honestly I think after this weeks' purge we'll be "as clean as we can get" for a while and we can focus on deleting new junk questions when they're asked...
    – voretaq7
    Commented Dec 22, 2011 at 21:09

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I'm not going to be deleting a lot of those, for one good reason:

Anything that has views > 1.5*(days old) is going to stay (or roughly anyway, I'm not going to do the maths on each one by hand, so if it looks close, it stays)

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  • Agreed - anything merged that isn't total crap and still attracts views that send people to a canonical (or at least good) answer should stay.
    – voretaq7
    Commented Dec 22, 2011 at 21:08
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    Wouldn't Deleting those questions just bump what they were merged into up in the search results? I don't think that by deleting them those views will enter the abyss, but rather that people will just find the actual question more easily. I do understand why you wouldn't want to delete them, though.
    – MDMarra
    Commented Dec 23, 2011 at 0:03
  • @MDMarra - I honestly don't know, but when Jeff tell us that high view questions should not be deleted, I listen.
    – Mark Henderson Mod
    Commented Dec 23, 2011 at 0:15
  • @MarkHenderson the link you provided was for closed questions. Merged questions are certainly a subset of that, but they also are unique in that they hold no valuable content other than a link to something else. I may venture into the shark-infested waters of m.so to see if the opinion is different for merged questions. Wish me luck.
    – MDMarra
    Commented Dec 23, 2011 at 3:03
  • @MDMarra - hah good luck, but you have to remember once upon a time, there wasn't 'closed' and 'merged' and 'migrated', there was just 'closed' (and merged/migrated etc were subsets of closed), so 'closed' encompassed pretty much everything.
    – Mark Henderson Mod
    Commented Dec 23, 2011 at 4:17

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