A little bit of Stack Overflow irony

This isn’t all that important of a post, but the circumstances were a little bit shocking at first and then at least mildly entertaining to me, so I figure I’ll write down the story.

Sometime in the last week or so, I crossed the 10k reputation threshold on Stack Overflow. I’ve had my eye on that particular reputation level for quite a while, primarily because of the “View deleted posts” privilege that comes along with it. This privilege would enable me to browse such classic (deleted) questions as:

So after about a week of reading the Classics, I popped on to SO to do some question answering, and guess what? My reputation had blinked back down to 9969. With just a little bit of digging, I discovered that the question to which I had posted my most upvoted answer of all time had been deleted as off topic.

The most entertaining part (and it’s even properly ironic) is that since I had just lost enough reputation that I no longer had the “view deleted posts” privilege, I couldn’t directly browse the question to retrieve and preserve my answer. I actually had to have StackPrinter rescue it from its cached copy of the content.

Before long (probably even tonight), I’ll manage to scramble back over the 10k mark, and could once again see the content on Stack Overflow. But since the post has fallen down the memory hole for all practical purposes, I’ve included it here for posterity:

What’s the funniest bug you’ve ever experienced?

At Microsoft, there’s a hardware test lab that’s responsible for testing the zillions of webcams out there against each new build of Windows to make sure it doesn’t break anything. One of the webcams was rolling when the 2001 Seattle earthquake hit .

After that earthquake, every bug database in the entire company had a few bugs entered of the form “when I click on the Update button, the entire lab starts shaking”, or “when I deleted the file, things started falling off the shelves”.

Most of the bugs of that form were closed “not repro”.

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