Community bot bumping dead, answered posts

Question

The Community bot seems to be bumping random questions that are quite dead and actually answered.

I think this behavior should be stopped, or we're risking to look like a spam junkyard.

Answer 1

When I visited the site back on April 13th, I actually felt the same way and - independently of this request - I set the site to only bump up to 10 questions at a time on the front page. Since then, this issue has decreased significantly, leaving a lot more recent content on the front page, rather than Community bumps of older posts.

That said, I'd like to caution y'all in the same way I did Android and Stack Overflow before this.

Community bumping is something that I think has been confusing to people for a while. There's questions on MSE about it from 2011 and 2013 and even back in 2016, Shog9 started a discussion to ask How can we make the purpose of Community "bumping" more obvious? - in it he states:

I was discussing this with my esteemed colleague jmac the other day, and it occurred to me that we never actually hint at what we want folks to do when these questions are bumped.

To be clear, the intent here is to resurface questions that someone has attempted to answer, but which haven't yet attracted any votes to either confirm the usefulness or decry the worthlessness of the answer(s) that've been posted. Q&A that, above all, needs feedback.

...But we don't really say this anywhere. And I strongly suspect that an awful lot of folks viewing these questions just shrug and move on.

And... well... I think that's maybe part of the struggle I'm seeing in your question - you're frustrated (understandably) that you keep seeing posts being repeatedly bumped by Community without really understanding why we do this. Now, unfortunately, while there were some proposed solutions, I don't think we ever actually followed through on this.

Given that, what's needed is more voting - whether that's up or downvoting on the answers or close voting the questions (if they're poorly-framed or out-of- scope). You can at least be glad your problem is smaller than Android's - while they had 9k qualifying questions, you have under 1000 of them - 1324 "unanswered" questions - 750 questions with no answers = ~574 questions that qualify for bumping by the Community user. That's still quite a few but it's not insurmountable!

Here are some more details I wrote up about how to assess individual questions and answers that qualify for bumping:

What I'm getting out of this all is that Community bumps are... a sort of unofficial, poorly-explained review queue. They're a way we've come up with to get people to look at older content and see if it has value - so, knowing that, what should you do?

The first thing worth considering is whether you have the domain expertise to judge the questions and answers - if not, then it's probably best to leave it for someone else to review. Let's assume you do have that expertise:

1. Look at the question first - is it a good question and not a duplicate?
   • Yes! (go to 2)
   • No! You have two options, you can do one or both of them:
     • Close - closed questions will not be bumped. (requires more than one person)
     • Downvote - negatively-scoring questions will not be bumped. (most effective if post has a score of 0)
2. Look at the zero-score answers one at a time and repeat as necessary.
   • If you can confirm the answer is good and correct, upvote - if at least one answer has a score of >= 1, the question will not be bumped.
   • If you can confirm the answer is low quality or incorrect, downvote - if all answers have a score <0, the question will not be bumped.
   • If you are unsure, skip. Best not to vote if you can't adequately judge the answer.

And, well - if you wrote all the answers, you're just going to have to find more people to use the site and vote them up. (Sorry Alexey ;) )

There's a ton more in the Android post that may very well apply here - things like what to do about old questions about technology that's deprecated and there may be no feasible way to answer those questions any longer or judge whether the answers are good or not. So, review it and, in the interim, know that you should (and have been) seeing less of this for a month or so now.