What happened to this question?

I actually deleted that question because it was posted by a user who exceeded the number of questions an individual can ask on Socratic in a day.

At the moment, the number of questions a user can post on Socratic is set to #5# per day. Some context to go by -- about #8# months ago, we've noticed an increase in the number of students who posted #10# or more questions in short periods of time, usually in a matter of minutes or hours.

The decision to limit the number of questions a user can ask on the site was made

• to prevent users from posting entire homework assignments on the site -- #5# questions or fewer is ok, #10# or #12# questions is not.

• to ensure that all the students who post questions on Socratic, including those who post #1# question, have more or less the same chances of getting answers

In your case, that question was part of a #10#-question set a user posted in less than #1# hour, so I deleted it (along with #4# others).

I guess that the timing was really off this time because, as it turns out, you were working on an answer at the same time I was deleting the question.

Now, I've been deleting questions for months and this never happened. Or maybe it did and nobody reported it, although I'm sure that someone would have mentioned the error.

Anyway, my apologies for the inconvenience...

As a final note, I moderate (check) questions two times a day, so there is always a chance that some will float around for hours before I get to them.

For questions posted by users with accounts, you can do a quick profile check before starting to work on an answer. If that user has more than #5# questions posted on that day, you can be sure that I will delete some of them to get the number down to #5#.

Most of the times, these questions are posted one after the other in a very short period of time, so I think that you will be able to notice them from the subject page as well.

In such cases, just leave me an @mention in the comments section and I won't delete that particular question.

As an extra precaution, I will start to save copies of the questions I end up deleting, so if this happens again I will be able to repost the question.

It's not the best fail-safe mechanism we can have, but I guess that we can make it work for the time being.