What's this "close-a-thon" all about?

Question

I saw this:

...but the link just pointed to the chat room, where I couldn't find any relevant explanation. In fact, the only thing containing "thon" that came up using "find" was a link to an old post about an answer-a-thon. I never really got the hang of chat rooms...

I couldn't find anything on meta, either, which is where I'd expect such a thing to be announced or discussed.

What's it all about?

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I hope the idea isn't to artificially game the "questions answered" stats by closing on-topic but challenging older questions, just because no-one has answered them yet? A travel site having difficult questions that can't be solved using Google alone is healthy.

Answer 1

Certainly we don't want to 'game' the system?? - we have many old ones. If I wanted to close all the old ones, I could do so as a mod, but the idea is just to have a day of people going through the unanswered ones and voting to close if they're off topic, dupes, or whatever.

As an added bonus (and perhaps ulterior motive) it draws eyes to the unanswered questions, and hopefully we'll get some answers for them too.

I've made a few quick small events in the upcoming days to test out to see if any of them make a useful difference. Please do sign up to them if interested, it only takes one click! If not, they won't happen again, but I'm hopeful.

Answer 2

MarkMayo is the athon-guy. More information on the events can be found on the "schedule" tab in the chatroom info (pretty hard to find if you ask me). Quoting from the link:

Close a-thon - please go through unanswered questions and vote to close any you feel shouldn't still be open!

I guess the idea is to clean-up unanswered questions deserving to be closed (off-topic/unclear/low-quality/etc.) rather than just closing off old unanswered questions simply because no-one has answered them yet.