Missing questions: Were they retracted?

[raavimohindar]

Missing questions: Were they retracted?

[knatten]

Question IDs are just the primary key in the database, they don't have any semantics other than that. So the grey ones could be for instance:

• Questions that are not done yet, e.g. just me typing in an idea like "Note to self: Make a question about partial ordering"
• Spam that a bot filled in in the submission form (The long series from 53 to 104 were mostly that iirc)
• Submitted questions that are plain wrong (I do get some of these where people just tested stuff on their machine and the behaviour is not actually guaranteed by the standard)
• Submitted questions that are uninteresting (I e.g. got one submission which just went int main() { std::cout << "Hello World";}
• Questions that have been retracted due to a non-fixable problem being discovered after publishing (has happened 3 times)

And so on. So the question IDs can not actually be used for anything interesting.