Did you see the number of these stale questions?
Can't we just kick Community's ass outa here?
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asked Jul 18, 2016 at 5:22
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6$\begingroup$ I was pondering leaving your question unanswered, to see what happens :) $\endgroup$– Laurent DuvalCommented Jul 18, 2016 at 6:45
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5$\begingroup$ The goal of the Community bump is to encourage users to 1) answer old questions, 2) upvote worthy answers that did not get noticed for some reason, or 3) vote to close the question. $\endgroup$– Jon Ericson StaffCommented Jul 18, 2016 at 6:56
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$\begingroup$ +1; opened one here. $\endgroup$– OverLordGoldDragonCommented Sep 29, 2020 at 1:45
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$\begingroup$ Btw, they asked if anyone else here supports this now (4 yrs later), so I didn't have much material to update the question - it'd help to upvote this. Also would be better for me to make a fresh Meta post before the bounty, I'm not even sure it was bumped due to all the downvotes. $\endgroup$– OverLordGoldDragonCommented Oct 11, 2020 at 19:35
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6 Answers
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Yeah, when I saw the main page this morning I felt the same. But honestly I don't think we can do much about that. Potentially we could ask to decrease the amount of questions that are being bumped. On the other hand, during Saturday and Sunday, there were only 5 new questions. Possibly that is also a reason for "Community" to go crazy like that.
In addition to Jon's comment, there is yet another reason. People register and visit DSP SE, just to ask their question. As soon as they get the answer, they don't even accept it and never come back again. Obviously there are also active users, who keep asking questions, and despite being pinged, they don't bother to accept the answers...
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As a relatively new member, I still find interesting that old questions pop up. This can be an incentive for answering, especially for newcomers. I do understand however this could be annoying. There are three levels of stale questions:
- unanswered,
- unvoted answers,
- unaccepted answers.
Unanswered ones have a specific entry in the question list. Perhaps unvoted and unaccepted should get a specific menu too? Ethically, can we consider that a question along with the long unvoted answers (1 year?) deserve a profound editing by members, to make it more attractive, and improve the overall quality of SE.DSP?
answered Jul 19, 2016 at 5:16
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3$\begingroup$ you're not terribly new, Laurent. i just think some of the questions are so ill-formed and the OP doesn't stick around to fix/improve the question so that it can be answered, so no one answers them or someone tries to, but no answer is accepted because the OP is gone. i just hate seeing those crappy questions getting re-posted. $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 19, 2016 at 5:43
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1$\begingroup$ @robert bristow-johnson Relatively to the crowd of most active members, having three years or more. Is there a way for moderators to flag questions as "no pop-up anymore, until the OP shows up to vote or improve the question". $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 19, 2016 at 5:49
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2$\begingroup$ i think i asked about this before, and there isn't. it's the way SE is designed. $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 19, 2016 at 6:09
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4$\begingroup$ @robertbristow-johnson: We can (and should) vote to close old low-quality questions with no (accepted) answers. $\endgroup$– Matt L.Commented Jul 21, 2016 at 8:00
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It looks like the Community bumps questions every hour for non-SO SE sites. So only having 5 questions asked over the weekend would swamp the site with Community bumps.
One thing we could all do with questions that have good answers that are not accepted is to ping / bump the OP to accept them. I've tried this with limited but non-zero success.
Another thing the mods could do is to delete old questions that Community bumps, but I'm not sure how this goes with standard SE operating procedure.
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Jojek's and Peter K.'s response reflect my experience exactly. I have had responses accepted months after they were submitted and then followed up by a "ping" sometime later.
Initially, "pinging" didn't feel right, but realising the visiting pattern, it makes absolute sense. The next time they visit the site, they are reminded by the "ping" and could possibly get motivated to accept the response.
Perhaps, we could suggest the automation of the "pinging" (by comment) by the "Community bot"? This could be based on a set of well defined criteria of what constitutes a "zombie" question.
I am not so sure about deleting questions because you never know what sort of problem someone might come across. In fact, an interesting phenomenon observed in SO is that some questions get valid answers that subsequently become invalid because the technology progressed or an API changed and there you can have the accepted answer being indicated as "wrong" and suggesting the new best practice in a different post. It's a very interesting side-effect of not deleting I think.
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Seeing those questions is annoying and quite useless if people do not to even have a look at them once they spot they are "modified by Community" because they think they have been abandoned by the questioner. You can avoid seeing those questions by clicking Questions (and then Newest if it is not selected), but that's one click too many!
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$\begingroup$ the work isn't an extra click. the work that i don't like repeating is reading the title or sometimes the question and figuring out that it can't really be answered. $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 25, 2016 at 4:44
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$\begingroup$ i understand that what we're "supposed" to do is vote to close, but that's not effective enough (requires other voters to join you). i just wish that the algorithm that "Community" is would get the hint eventually and stop resurrecting old, unanswerable, crappy questions that never get answered. at some point it should recognize that about a question and stop reposting it. $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 25, 2016 at 4:47
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$\begingroup$ Closing is not that nice because then there cannot be new answers to the question. Related: I have written an answer to a couple of questions that already had an accepted answer. $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 25, 2016 at 5:07
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$\begingroup$ the one's with accepted answers don't get resurrected by Community. $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 25, 2016 at 5:24
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$\begingroup$ Yeah I just wanted to point out that people might want to still answer those questions even if they have good answers. $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 25, 2016 at 7:08
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From here; How to stop the bumping:
- Upvote an answer
- Downvote the question
- Close the question
I've seen many effortful answers with no upvotes; so perhaps this shall do a newfound motivation. For example, this one - which I've one-upped.
But... it's not good enough. Discussion more appropriate here.
answered Sep 29, 2020 at 5:05