The SE sites tend to fill up with questions asked (usually by new folk) which get a number of requests for clarification in the comments, but the OP never returns to the crime scene.
I would like to recommend some sort of timeout, after which failure to respond to such requests causes the question to be deleted. Not "On Hold," but deleted. These questions rarely get upvoted, so there's no interest in the population or from the OP.
This happens already, and quite fast (9 days after closure), by a process nicknamed Roomba:
Abandoned, unanswered questions can be a nuisance for readers when they appear in search results. While every question deserves a chance to be answered, at some point the annoyance to those searching for a solution outweighs the increasingly-small chance that an answer will be provided.
For this reason, the Community user will automatically delete old abandoned/dead questions
...
If the question was closed more than 9 days ago, and ...
- not closed as a duplicate
- has a score of 0 or less
- is not locked
- has no answers with a score > 0
- has no accepted answer
- has no pending reopen votes
- has not been edited in the past 9 days
... it will be automatically deleted. These are "abandoned closed", and are termed as RemoveAbandonedClosed.
