I have asked a question that received useful answers, but none of them was fully satisfying.

As I refined my question, I offered a bounty to attract better answers and that worked.

However, one user gave a very good solution in the comments of my question (it was quite short and should have been detailed in an actual answer). I upvoted his comment and told him that was the solution I was expecting.

Then, this user deleted his comments (and the useful links he wrote) and just left.

What should I do? Should I post an answer myself (and what happens with my bounty in that case)?

Is it possible to find the deleted comments to help me write a good answer?

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How long ago did this happen? Maybe he decided that he should write up a complete answer, and deleted his comment while preparing said answer. – Cody Gray 5 hours ago
    
@Cody Posted 16 hours ago, deleted 9 hours ago. – deceze 5 hours ago
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Hmm, well, maybe he's a very slow typist. :-) – Cody Gray 5 hours ago
    
More likely that they have discovered some error in their ways which Ben hasn't yet thought through… or… who knows… they forgot their keys or something. – deceze 5 hours ago
up vote 5 down vote accepted

This was the comment:

this copied from that might help (but after equating widths use grid.arrange(grobs=gl))

(anonymous to protect the innocent; if they don't want to be associated with it, let them)

Some users feel there's a bit of an honour system with regards to who gets to write up an answer, but especially in this case this shouldn't stop you. What we want on SO is answers to questions, and no identity politics. If nobody else has provided this solution to the problem yet, by all means, please write up an answer and post it.

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Then, this user deleted his comments (and the useful links he wrote) and just left.

Very curious, but that's his prerogative. In that case you can't really do much, comments are ephemeral and not really meant to stay anyways. It could be that he didn't even delete the comment himself, but that it was flagged and deleted by a moderator. (Unlikely in this case, but possible)

What should I do? Should I post an answer myself (and what happens with my bounty in that case)?

There's nothing stopping you from writing a comprehensive and decent answer yourself. You can do that and even accept your own answer (that will not pin it to the top, though).

You'll either have to manually award the bounty to the next best answer (in your opinion) or let it expire. This causes it to be auto awarded to the best answer by votes that has at least a score of +2. If no other answer has a score of at least +2 and you let the bounty expire, nobody gets the bounty reputation.

Is it possible to find the deleted comments to help me write a good answer?

Probably not. Only moderators can see deleted comments, and I'm not sure a moderator would provide the deleted comment if you flagged. But if you absolutely want to see that comment, raise a custom flag on your post asking for it. That flag may get declined though, so proceed with caution.

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