This doesn't work anymore. It relied on a quirk of the site's permissions system which has been removed.

Screenshot

About

Have you ever followed a link to an old question only to find it deleted? I have, and it very disappointing. Thanks to the way deleted posts can be edited, you can now be a little bit less disappointed!

The Stack Exchange Deleted Question Viewer is a user script that will activate when you visit a deleted question. It will attempt to retrieve the question's content for you, as well as the author and most recent editor if possible. (It does not retrieve answers, just the original question.)

This will fail for locked questions, because the edit page this relies on is unavailable for them.

You can test this with a deleted question of mine on meta.stackoverflow.com, then consider taking a look at the Popular Deleted Questions list on meta.

License

Released under the MIT Open Source License.

Installation

Click here to install the the Stack Exchange Deleted Question Viewer.

Platform

The script will run on Chrome or on Firefox with with the Greasemonkey plugin.

Contact

The Stack Exchange Deleted Question Viewer was written me, Jeremy Banks. You can just leave feedback in the comments, but if you would like to email me my address is in my profile.

Code

The Stack Exchange Deleted Question Viewer was written in CoffeeScript. The source file is available here. Be warned that it's a bit of a mess.