Posts going missing

Question

About 9 hours ago I posted an item to the Windows 7 Application Compatibility forum.

When I tried to find it in the forum just now, it had gone. Or had never appeared.

When I search in the box at

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itproappcompat/threads

for "mailmerge", I see two results titled

Word MailMerge and Tablet/Touchscreen Functionality

However, following both links leads to a Page not Found page. (For example, one link is

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Error/Error404.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/Forums/en/w7itproappcompat/thread/c061ba93-66eb-4b76-b801-3a460d9bcd87

How is it that posts disappear but the search engine still appears to find them? What happened to my post?

Thanks.

 

 

Answer 1

You will find your posts by going to My Threads or My Forum Threads.

The search engine is reporting the state at the time the last indexes were created. At that time those posts were still in the original forums.

By the time you clicked on the links provided by the search engine, the posts had been moved (or deleted but probably moved) by a Moderator to another forum. In that case the present version of the forum software cuts the link as the post when in a different forum is given a different URL (the forum name is part of the URL).

A fix due at the end of this month will fix this problem and an old URL when clicked will be re-directed to the new URL for the same item.

P.S. In future I suggest the Suggestions and Feedback for the Forums forum here 

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/suggest/threads

for similar questions which like this are more forum than search.

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Answer 2

Thanks Mike.