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Related to Should we close outdated, abandoned questions?

It would be fantastic if we had a way to either manually or automatically flag a question as "abandoned." Many questions are migrated from Stack Overflow and the original poster never follows the question to update it, accept an answer, or otherwise engage in the community here.

Having so many abandoned questions raises our total number of "unanswered" questions, and many of these are bounced to the top of the "active questions" list by Community automatically.

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To quote Jeff

Just FYI the following things happen automatically every week:

  • auto-deletion of questions more than 30 days old with no answers, and -1 score or lower
  • auto-deletion of questions more than 365 days old with no answers, low views, <= 1 comments, and <= 0 score

So what I do on such questions:

  • Convert answers which should be comment to … well, comments.
  • Vote the question down.
  • Close incomplete or too localized questions.

The garbage collector will then take care of those questions.

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  • I'm curious about one thing - what exactly does "low views" mean? Is there a specific number of views, or is it an algorithm based on age?
    – SickHippie
    Commented Apr 30, 2012 at 20:23
  • Hmm. If that's the case, then I've seen cases where this isn't true. I've seen questions from years ago that were migrated here that have no selected answers or votes, don't ask me to name any though I don't know of any off of the top of my head. Commented May 11, 2012 at 0:42
  • @SickHippie I'm not sure, I found nothing obvious … If I had to do it, I would take ~20% of the average view count.
    – fuxia Mod
    Commented May 11, 2012 at 3:11

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