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At some points during the day, especially when the Americans go to sleep, there are more bumped old questions than new questions.

I can't remember ever seeing someone write a decent answer for a question that is 4 years old. I am not saying it never happens, but I do not have data to support the claim that it happens enough to make the bumping worth it.

People mostly just seem to ignore the bumped questions; I don't think they get interacted with a lot (again, we need data to confirm if this is the case).

Often a question gets bumped many times and no one upvotes or downvotes the answer(s). It wasn't even clear to me that is what we are supposed to do. And I am not going to do it because I don't see the point in upvoting an answer from 2019 to a question that was asked in 2019.

For example, this question was bumped 9 times: and its a duplicate of another 100 similar questions.

How has this improved the quality of superuser.com? It hasn't. It has wasted precious volunteer time.

I am not sure if bumping should be stopped, or the frequency should just be decreased (or based on the frequency of new questions), but someone should gather this data and adjust the config of the Community bot imho.

Also, I'd love to get some data that enables us to see if bumping ancient questions is worth it.

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    Solution. Americans should never sleep (I kid I kid). More seriously - I think how 'bad' it is is going to be a function of what people do with those posts and our overall post frequency
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Commented Apr 12, 2023 at 6:00
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    The network default is one question at a time - this site has a site-specific override for two questions at a time. This used to be Trilogy-wide, but after other SE sites got introduced through Area 51 one became the effective default.
    – gparyani
    Commented Apr 14, 2023 at 18:53
  • @gparyani But who got the kind of power to change or get rid of this functionality?
    – Gantendo
    Commented Apr 14, 2023 at 18:54
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    @JourneymanGeek Should we consider getting rid of the now site-specific override that two questions at a time are bumped instead of one (originally network default back when the network was just the Trilogy)? Server Fault got rid of theirs.
    – gparyani
    Commented Apr 14, 2023 at 18:54
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    Just make a positively-received feature request with a reasoned argument, then once consensus moves toward it flag for a moderator to tag as status-review and the site developers will change it.
    – gparyani
    Commented Apr 14, 2023 at 18:55

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Community user bumps one question "randomly" selected every hour. At the site quite time it looks that it's too much, disappointing, etc. At this moment I don't remember if this might be customized per site. In such case, it will be necessary to make a .

Before making one, I suggest you to look at Meta Stack Exchange about the discussions about this feature as well about the feature request process. Regarding the feature request process, start at the feature-request wiki -> https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/feature-request/info.

Regarding questions that are bumped too many times, that happens because those questions and/or their answers are neglected. "The solution" for neglected posts is to answer and moderate the site: upvote, downvote, edit, flag, vote to close, vote to delete, comment. There is no shame in skipping, but not having enough moderators (community members moderating the site) partially explaing having so many bumped posts.

Regarding data, Stack Exchange Data Explorer (SEDE) (in the footer the links just says "Data") might be helpful. There are a lot of queries. Probably there is already some about bumped posts. Also in Meta SE there are several questions about SE / data-explorer.

At the end, the question is, is really a problem having bumped posts multiple times? What will be the effect of stopping Community user from bumping all posts? What will be the effect of limiting the number of times that a post is bumped? Is there another way to handle neglected posts that might be more effective that bumping them?

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    Thanks, I'll read Meta Stack Exchange. I am curious if people agree/disagree. I understand one possible solution is to upvote/downvote/edit/flag etc on ancient questions but there is a much better (imho) alternative solution: let's simply stop bumping them. There are many thousands of them and bumping them does not seem to achieve its intended goal as far as i can tell (after 20 months). The data looks interesting, I'll take a look thank you!
    – Gantendo
    Commented Apr 12, 2023 at 4:55
  • "let's simply stop bumping them": that will not happen soon ( not in the next 12 weeks, and very unlikely this year). I don't have any "insider" data, just an "educated guess".
    – user152004
    Commented Apr 12, 2023 at 4:56
  • If it's too easy to grasp, then one should never reach for it. ;-) I know how hard it is to change stuff like this, even when there is overwhelming evidence that it doesn't work (and in this case i'm trusting my gut)
    – Gantendo
    Commented Apr 12, 2023 at 4:59
  • Besides that it doesn't work, it has competition. There are other things that don't work, and a lot of new desired / expected features but not enough time, money etc. :)
    – user152004
    Commented Apr 12, 2023 at 5:01
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    Good point. This planet is suboptimal. decision-making-solutions.com/images/…
    – Gantendo
    Commented Apr 12, 2023 at 5:18
  • We could discover what happens when we don't bump old questions by not bumping em. It would not surprise me if there wouldn't be much of a difference. Bumping the same low quality question over and over again does not make people more likely to engage with it. I'd need to find or become an SQL expert to get good data tho. Thanks, lots to think about!
    – Gantendo
    Commented Apr 12, 2023 at 5:20
  • Only people like Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian, Cristiano Ronaldo or alike move the world with a tweet / gesture. The rest of us, need to write "few" more words / lift "few" more "bricks".
    – user152004
    Commented Apr 12, 2023 at 5:33
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    I am pretty sure that I have a better chance of influencing decisions on the stack exchange network than Kim Kardashian. She probably doesn't even have enough money to buy it; what a loser!
    – Gantendo
    Commented Apr 12, 2023 at 5:40
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Alternative solution - just for sake of completeness…

Bookmark to 'newest', rather than just the top level domain, e.g.
https://superuser.com/questions?tab=Newest rather than
https://superuser.com/

This will ignore bumped questions entirely & only show posts by 'last asked'.
It doesn't fix the issue, but it does mean you'll neither know nor care. This is actually my default bookmark style for all my regularly-visited stacks.

By way of explanation, if you go to the TLD, not only do you get Active by default, you also get no option for Newest in the menu at the top

enter image description here

If you look in the Burger menu, top left & select Questions…

enter image description here

You then get different 'sort by' options

enter image description here

I think you need to be signed in to do this.

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  • Thanks, that is a nice workaround for me, but spreading this knowledge to everyone would take a while ;-)
    – Gantendo
    Commented Apr 15, 2023 at 3:42

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