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A couple days ago, someone posted a bug report that a question that qualified for a Roomba automatic deletion criterion wasn't deleted despite qualifying for at least three weekly runs of the script that scans for it. Shortly after the bug report, on the next weekly run, it was deleted.

The author of the Roomba Forecaster user script, which displays whether a given question qualifies for a Roomba criterion, posted this comment, which reads in part:

However, in investigations/testing for Roomba Forecaster, there have periodically been questions which qualify under all published criteria, but which don't get deleted [...] However, the questions usually end up deleted by the Roomba shortly after I encounter them, even if they qualified for deletion for years, but were not deleted in that time. This implies either caching of some sort or something associated with just viewing the question.

Do the Roomba scripts not run on questions that aren't viewed in a long time? If not, what's the general cause of questions not being deleted despite meeting all criteria (including hidden ones)? Could it be that the script is non-deterministic just like badge scripts?

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    In my view, not deleting such questions if they aren't viewed can allow for privilege escalation. When a question is deleted, all its reputation changes are wiped away (the retention exemption doesn't apply since the criteria for that are mutually exclusive to the Roomba criteria). A question that qualifies for the Roomba could have positive reputation changes despite the low enough score, since upvotes award five times more reputation than downvotes.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Jan 17, 2022 at 6:35
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    If the question were deleted on time, those reputation changes would be nullified, but since they're not, they potentially allow a user to continue using a reputation-based privilege that they would otherwise not be able to use if it were deleted on time. Simply viewing a question shouldn't cause users to lose a privilege; if it is to be removed, it should be done so quickly, rather than by a single question view being the proximate cause.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Jan 17, 2022 at 6:35

1 Answer 1

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The only check that pays any attention to views is RemoveAbandonedQuestions which requires a low number of views on the question, and thus wouldn't make any sense to also require it to be viewed more often as those would be opposing criteria. The others do not look at views at all.

As far as the specific question you linked: coincidence? It was not eligible for auto-deletion until 27 days ago when its answer was deleted. Past that, there appears to have been something wrong with the scheduler at the time, which actually resulted in the question getting deleted twice within a short timeframe.

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    As Makyen commented and I quoted, they've come across several questions that met the criteria for deletion and continued to meet them for years but weren't auto-deleted, then were auto-deleted after they viewed the question the next time the script ran. I've pinged them and hope they provide examples, but why would this be happening?
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Jan 17, 2022 at 6:59
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    Also, I was aware that it didn't meet the deletion criteria for only that much time, which is why I said it only qualified for at least three weekly runs.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Jan 17, 2022 at 7:00
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    I don't know. There's nothing in the code that would result in that happening. Likely just seeing patterns where none exist. It's more likely they are just seeing the scheduler mess up every now and then. But I can say with absolute certainly it is not because they viewed it recently.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Jan 17, 2022 at 7:01

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