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On Super User; @IvoFlipse was looking for a query to find old unanswered inactive questions with low views/votes. Because those kind of questions clutter the site and keep the unanswered question ratio high, it is a good idea to keep the site clean from questions like these.

It's very unlikely that someone that asked a question (about a problem) that has been inactive and not popular for more than a year, will still be very active and have the same problem now.

So, we worked on a query to find such questions. As flagging doesn't allow mass deletion, we opened a meta question on Super User where we can list such questions. As this seems a nice idea, other SE 2.0 communities might benefit by doing the same; feel free to discuss safe limits for this so that @JeffAtwood might be able automatize this...

Until now we've been doing this manually to ensure we don't prune questions of high quality.

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As I mentioned there, you should know that negatively voted zero answer questions are automatically deleted from all of our sites after 30 days.. and it's been this way for months.

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  • I'm sure the amount of such questions is pretty low, because at least on SU they would either be edited into something a bit more decent or closed by Diago.
    – Ivo Flipse
    Commented Jan 27, 2011 at 18:59
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Variation on a theme:

Really old questions, no upvotes, <100 views, low rep OP, not seen in last year

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    I think puting a hard-coded limit on the number of views is a dangerous approach. Take for example the "wince" (Windows Embedded CE) tag, that only has 142 followers. You cannot compare the number of views for questions on this topic to questions on more "common" topics like "silverlight" for example (4.5k followers at the time of writing this comment). Still "wince" questions might be useful, even if it is for a small community.
    – yms
    Commented Apr 21, 2011 at 12:51

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