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I am relatively new to vi.se, and over the past few weeks I have noticed that when I visit the Home page (https://vi.stackexchange.com/), often old questions will come to the top. An example is this question which, on opening, says that it was active yesterday. However, I cannot find any actual activity (no edits, no new answers and no comments since last year). Why does this happen?

On a tangential note, is the feeling of the community / mods that it is worth trying to answer such questions? On the one hand, it may help someone in the future. On the other hand, the original poster may not see the answer or may have taken a different approach, meaning that a potential answer might not attract the appropriate conversation to assess whether or not it addressed the original question (not looking for points, if that's what they're called, just don't want to be talking to myself in answering a dead question).

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Looking at the timeline of this particular question (perhaps only mods will have access to it), I can see it was "bumped" by "Community", with comment "This question has answers that may be good or bad; the system has marked it active so that they can be reviewed."

This is something automatic that a Stack Exchange system does to questions that don't have an answer or that have an answer that hasn't been upvoted or accepted or so on.

Yes, I guess the intent is to attract attention to the question, either to attract more/better answers, or attract votes to the existing answers, or to attract flags to close the question.

I agree that answers to a question that has been dormant is not very likely to attract attention from the original poster, but it might attract upvotes from others who have been monitoring active questions, or from other users who happen to have a similar question and bump into that one through a search and might like to find a good answer that works for them there.

I don't think we can change this behavior, Stack Exchange will most probably have its "Community" account periodically bumping questions that haven't been resolved satisfactorily in hopes of attracting attention to get them to some kind of resolution.

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    All users can see the timeline – you can check this yourself by opening vi.stackexchange.com/posts/25556/timeline in a private browser window (or another browser).
    – Glorfindel
    Feb 23, 2021 at 7:07
  • Thanks Glorfindel. I was not aware of that feature and spent a few minutes hunting around after you mentioned it -- turns out it's available by pressing the "back circle arrow" symbol underneath the voting buttons next to the question but that was not obvious to me! Feb 23, 2021 at 10:49
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I can't speak for the rest of the community, but I would personally love it if you were to answer questions when they are bumped to the front page like this. There are some questions that keep popping back up which I would love to stop seeing, but which I can't or don't fancy answering myself, and upon which I can't bring myself to upvote any of the existing answers.

On a slightly less selfish note, the fewer unanswered questions there are on the site, the more useful a resource it is.

Answer away!

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