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I know there is a background process that bumps unanswered questions to home page; I understand the logic behind this is to give them a chance to be answered.

The problem is, this often bumps to home page old and useless questions, which are often no longer relevant at all (or could not be answered in the first place because they didn't make a lot of sense).

Discerning how much sense a question makes or how relevant it is can't easily be automated; but shouldn't this process at least avoid bumping to home page, say, more than X-years-old questions? An additional criterion could be the number of upvotes they have (which is often zero).


Addendum: this has also the unfortunate side effect of new and clueless users trying to answer ages-old meaningless questions; which needless to say tends to have... pretty bad results.

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  • Good question, I'am asking on TL if it's in their plan, or maybe to stop bumping question that use tag about legacy product too. – yagmoth555 Nov 26 '20 at 21:31
  • Case in point: serverfault.com/questions/679763/… – Massimo Nov 28 '20 at 0:59
  • Another case in point: this just tricked me into answering a TEN YEARS OLD QUESTION. serverfault.com/questions/232161/… – Massimo Jan 23 at 0:13
  • @Massimo but your answer got two up votes, so even if the question is 10 years old, apparently some people found it useful enough to vote. – Alex Apr 12 at 19:13
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And then it’s hilarious when specifically this post gets bumped to the front page by ♦️ Community...

enter image description here

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0

The reason that the post still exists is because the OP never picked an Answer. They made a comment that they decided to ignore it a month or so after they asked.

I think you made it worse in some ways by commenting on it since your comment doesn't solve the problem either, just shows how to get into that session. It also isn't an Answer so the OP cannot mark it as correct if they wanted to, which would make it go away.

About 10 days after your comment, the OP logged into the site so they saw the activity, which you can check by looking at their profile, before you take any action.

My suggestion, delete your comments then flag to close. This way you are not guilty of the same complaint you make in an different META post about poor quality answers/comments to old posts. Or just flag to close the way it is now. I frankly was not aware of that trick so the information had some minor historic value, although zero relevance.

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  • Whilst not having an accepted answer may cause community to bump the question to the front page it is not the only reason. A question that has no UPVOTED answers is also considered to be unanswered and therefore eligible for a bump. – user9517 Dec 8 '20 at 12:19

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