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I noticed that this question got bumped to the front page recently. By clicking the ?lastactivity link I was taken to just the top of the question and saw no edits or answers since November, which probably means that whatever bumped it was deleted. The user that caused the bump has no rep or actions so I'm guessing it was a "not a real answer" deletion.

This seems a bit lame to me. At the end of the day, a question got bumped onto the front page for no real reason. It has no reason to take up space there; it's already been sufficiently answered and the only cause of the bump was an answer that (most likely) wasn't a real answer.

I think that if a question gets bumped because of a new answer, and that answer is deleted because it's not a real answer (or is spam or whatever), the question should get unbumped.

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  • 5
    I dunno; if a question is losing an answer, one could argue that it could stand to have the extra, momentary attention of being bumped.
    – Andrew Barber
    Commented Jan 26, 2012 at 0:43
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    I'm talking about cases where the answer is lost because it was spam/not-an-answer; once it's deleted the question is basically unchanged.
    – Toomai
    Commented Jan 26, 2012 at 3:21
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    There are many reasons the answer could have been deleted. My comment stands for all of them. It really isn't a big deal. Heck... the system randomly bumps old posts, too.
    – Andrew Barber
    Commented Jan 26, 2012 at 9:58

1 Answer 1

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This would cause a problem. Imagine this:

  1. Spammer posts an answer linking to real-rolex-watches-and-awesome-seo-services.info.
  2. Spammer immediately deletes the answer.
  3. Spammer waits for an hour.
  4. Spammer undeletes the answer.

The fact that this answer was posted would never cause the question to be on the front page, thus nobody may notice what's going on. After all, the bumping is also there to allow people to review what's changed. Granted, even with the way it currently works, only 10ks and mods would see the issue, but with your change, nobody would.

The only way to solve this then would be to cause an undeletion to bump a post. That however gives you a free, no-questions-asked, no-disadvantage way to continuously bump a post.

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  • 1
    If deleting bumps the post and undeleting doesn't, then don't you already have this "a free, no-questions-asked, no-disadvantage way to continuously bump a post" anyway?
    – forsvarir
    Commented Jan 26, 2012 at 8:47
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    Deleting doesn't bump the post.
    – balpha StaffMod
    Commented Jan 26, 2012 at 9:26
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    I don't know what the best answer is, but I can motivate solving the problem. For <10k users, it's pretty annoying when reading new activity from the front page that some of it might just be from bad new answers immediately deleted by mods. 10k users can at least see the deleted answers and quickly realize, but <10k users (assuming they even know that this can happen) have to scroll through and see that there's nothing new, or remember the username and search for it. Sometimes I spend as much time doing this as reading actual new content.
    – Cascabel
    Commented Jul 23, 2012 at 16:37
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    If you can imagine a problem, you can imagine a solution... If a spammer undeletes the answer, get it to be 'bumped' to frontpage. In the end, that was the last activity on that question.
    – GUI Junkie
    Commented Apr 9, 2013 at 22:07
  • Link back to Cooking.SE meta discussion.
    – GUI Junkie
    Commented Apr 9, 2013 at 22:09
  • @GUIJunkie No, that leads to the problem mentioned here (and I also mentioned it on cooking): users can undelete their posts in order to deliberately bump them. Potential solutions are messier; you have to distinguish between owner deletion and mod deletion.
    – Cascabel
    Commented Apr 9, 2013 at 22:17
  • @Jefromi. Ah, right. Understood. We people are awful, sometimes.
    – GUI Junkie
    Commented Apr 9, 2013 at 22:20
  • Isn't it trivial to find such posts now with review queues?
    – Tobias Kienzler
    Commented Jul 11, 2013 at 11:04

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