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Two of my questions, each unanswered after eight months, were down voted within a minute of each other last night. I don't dispute the merits (or lack thereof) for down voting these questions.

The first was down voted at 22:55 and the second at 22:56. That smells of someone (or some 'bot) working through a list of based on some filter. Is there a 'down vote campaign' underway?

Here are the posts in question:

https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/30512/excerpt-tinymce-editor-hijacks-image-from-post-editor-on-insert-into-post

https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/30501/any-way-to-make-the-tinymce-html-editor-show-br-and-p-tags-without-no-autop

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That’s not a campaign … just me. :)

I voted both questions down because they looked abandoned (no updates, no debug information), and almost too localized. Not enough to close them, but surely worth a “poke”. I can and I will remove the downvotes if you add useful updates.

And just in case anyone else had the same experience: I go through our old, unanswered question each day and look very closely at them. Then I choose one of the following options:

  • Answer interesting questions. Sometimes the answer is hidden in a comment and I ask to move the answer to a real answer. After two or three weeks I come back either vote up the real answer or – if nothing happened – I just “steal” the answer. Example.
  • I vote for good questions if I don’t know the answer (and edit to make them even better).
  • I close bad questions.
  • I vote down questions that look like yours, hoping that they get more attention by their askers. If the asker doesn’t care anymore the garbage collector will delete those questions after a while.

Our answer rate was 74% on 16. February 2012. Terrible bad. Some people rather asked on Stack Overflow than on our site because they thought they wouldn’t get an answer here!

Now we are on 83%. Much better, but still not good enough. And no, that’s not my work alone. :)
My impression is that we have much more active members now. But keeping the site interesting for new members requires constant active work on our questions. Interesting questions will come up again.

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    OK Thanks for the explanation. I've deleted both of them. For the first, I abandoned the attempt to support two tinyMCE editors as 'not worth the effort.' So I no longer have any interest in fixing the problem. And with the Editor API improvements in 3.3, the simple solution will be to upgrade.
    – marfarma
    Jun 28, 2012 at 22:20
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    And for the second one, instead of fixing tinyMCE to display those characters, I opted for a content filter - a bit brute force, but it got the job done. So, again, no longer interested in the problem. No need to wait for the Garbage Collector.
    – marfarma
    Jun 28, 2012 at 22:22
  • @toscho: i think i have couple of mine too :)
    – Sisir
    Jun 29, 2012 at 6:18
  • @toscho I'm starting to hunt through the unanswered list too, and I came across this. Just wondering if this is still your current approach, if so I will follow it too. If not would you mind editing or pointing me to your current approach? I note we're back down to 71% unanswered and there's currently 10,778 with no answers
    – Tim Malone
    Jun 28, 2016 at 10:41
  • @TimMalone I gave up a long time ago. It is still a valid approach, I'm just too busy to do that.
    – fuxia Mod
    Jun 28, 2016 at 11:00
  • @toscho Fair enough. Thanks!
    – Tim Malone
    Jun 28, 2016 at 11:01

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