10

A while ago I asked a question on Meta SO regarding one of my answers on SO, and I linked my answer in the question.
The answer I linked was relevant to the question, and the link I gave was a valid link provided by SO's share feature.

The link was not "click bait" or a "bad link" (I even double checked the link before sharing it), I linked it because I wanted to give people a better idea of what I meant.

I clearly wasn't sharing anything bad or inappropriate so why was my link removed?
Also should I not be linking my posts in a meta question?

I probably shouldn't... but here's is a link to the revisions of the question.

7
  • 2
    @yellowantphil Brilliant idea, mate 😄.
    – user5870134
    Jan 28, 2017 at 2:29
  • 1
    Is this your old Meta question?
    – duplode
    Jan 28, 2017 at 2:33
  • @duplode Yes. How did you find it that fast?
    – user5870134
    Jan 28, 2017 at 2:35
  • You have six meta questions in your profile. Two of them were asked right now; from the other four, I looked at the edit history of the first one whose last edit was done by someone else, and guessed correctly.
    – duplode
    Jan 28, 2017 at 2:37
  • Ah, well I'll spare others from looking, for those of you interested I linked the question's revisions.
    – user5870134
    Jan 28, 2017 at 2:40
  • 4
    For the future, you can ping the editor in a comment below the post to ask them for clarification.
    – jscs
    Jan 28, 2017 at 22:15
  • 2
    @yellowantphil Then, for bonus fun, we can close that new question as a duplicate of this one.
    – Jason C
    Jan 28, 2017 at 23:26

1 Answer 1

23

After looking at the edit history of your old meta question, I guess the link to your answer was removed not for any deeper reason but merely to make the generality of your question more evident, as the reference to your answer wasn't at all necessary to understand what you were asking. Ideally, the editor would have explained that in the edit summary, so that you weren't left to wonder about the reason.

People sometimes omit links to main site posts in Meta posts to discourage drive-by voting (the so-called "Meta effect"), but there is no blanket rule against such links, and it is generally okay to include them if they are important for making sense of the Meta question. (By the way, in the case of this Meta question it is entirely fine to link to your older Meta post.)

3
  • 4
    Your explanation is plausible, but my guess is that the edit was simply made to make the Meta question more general. Jan 28, 2017 at 11:31
  • @CodyGray That makes sense too. In fact, I don't think "concise" expressed perfectly what I had in mind, so I replaced it with something that is halfway between our guesses.
    – duplode
    Jan 28, 2017 at 11:54
  • 1
    @duplode Thanks for taking the time to answer my question, appreciate it.
    – user5870134
    Jan 28, 2017 at 16:03

You must log in to answer this question.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342406/why-did-my-linked-answer-get-removed-from-my-meta-question
meta.stackoverflow.com
CC-MAIN-2023-50
112438
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:3IW2FA4H7CZHJ5LGWVV4OUPHNC34OVC3
<urn:uuid:1d04a713-9377-4733-97da-21735700bb02>
2023-12-07T10:38:53Z
104.18.32.7
text/html
sha1:4XAHGPQTFLCCLOYJIDJ3XLNYNZUTHGBL
<urn:uuid:4895d133-759e-430c-8ae7-c2f50ed256d1>
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342406/why-did-my-linked-answer-get-removed-from-my-meta-question
response
<urn:uuid:81516ad5-b254-4715-b6c2-5ab22d4cbd02>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2023-50
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for November/December 2023
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-156
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/