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I don't know why the Community Bot is bumping questions to the top.

A moderator here has told me that once the OP has an answer they accept, questions may as well be closed. This suggests to me that we shouldn't care about old questions, and that they are only designed to help the OP.

I disagree with that, but if that moderator opinion, why is the Community Bot bumping very old questions. Obviously if a 5 year old question gets bumped, that's not going to be useful to the OP, who presumably has had some movement on their situation in that time.

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  • I dont know why someone would have downvoted this question. It is a valid question. I spend most of my time on SuperUer.com and see the same thing all the time. A question from over a decade ago gets bumped to the top. Generally, It is something that is completely irrelevant in modern times or the OP never accepted an answer. Everyone just ignores them. But as the answer below states, its part of the backend coding. It probably should be removed, as it really doesnt add any value. +1 BTW.
    – Keltari
    Commented Mar 27, 2023 at 17:51

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No we can't - Community bot is SE-wide behaviour and we can't do anything about it.

There's various reasons why you might see something as bumped by Community, for example the bot bumps old open questions that don't have an answer with a score higher than zero. Personally, I really wish it didn't, I've never seen any real value come from it happening, either here or on other sites on the network, but as I say this is not something that's within our control.

Questions/Answers aren't solely for the benefit of the OP, although obviously they are a major recipient and this element is substantially decreased when significant time has passed. IMO this should be factored in when people consider resurrecting an older question and the amount of times I've seen an unsuspecting new contributor not realise that the question they've written an answer or comment directed at the OP on is 5 years old simply because that pesky bot has bumped it to the main page for one reason or another is depressing. On the other hand if a user who knows full well that the question is ancient and the OP themselves long gone can write a great answer that really adds value for future readers I wouldn't want to discourage that.

Eagle-eyed users will spot there's some questions that have been bumped by Community in the last 24hrs or so that don't meet this criteria, this is actually down to a peculiarity of the way the SE system handles certain curation actions.

Take this question as an example, there was a new "answer" added that consisted of a repeated profanity (10k users will be able to see the deleted answer if they really want to) and it was (rightly) flagged into oblivion and the system took care of it. Hence "Community" has updated that question recently and it gets bumped.

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Because many imes a question gets bumped because there isn't an answer with a score above zero I have decided over the last few months to seriously review the questions to see if one or more answers deserve a vote.

I don't just randomly pick an answer. I still look for quality. I also don't vote if the topic is way outside my experience.

I have been doing this in several of the communities I am active in.

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