Why does "Community" make old questions active again?

Question

This is something I've noticed and wondered about for awhile.

I see that the user "Community", which from what I understand is basically an automatic bot that scraps the site, sometimes makes questions from years ago active again.

If I take a look at the question's timeline there is no new activity besides Community bumping the post with a comment that says...

This question has answers that may be good or bad; the system has marked it active so that they can be reviewed.

What is the purpose or hope in doing this? In a lot of cases I looked at the OP has very low rep and the question was asked years ago. So the OP is most likely long gone.

Sometimes, when scrolling through the questions, I find myself reading through one of these only to realize later that the question was asked so long ago, I feel like I just wasted my time. Should I be doing something when I come across these? Right now I just avoid them.

Answer 1

The Community Bot has a few functions. One of these is bumping old topics which do not have any accepted answers. Accepted answers count as any answer that has a positive score ( not necessarily a checkmark ). Sometimes older questions that have answers do not have quality answers or not well formatted answers and can be improved upon.

If you have a good answer you feel both answers the question and can provide help to other users who may run across the question please do answer it. Usually you'll gain upvotes as people run across it which then will count as it being "Answered" and will not get bumped by the Community Bot in the future.

One last benefit of the Community Bot doing this action is that it keeps the front-page rotating. Bumping an old question may bring to the fore-front a question that the current user didn't know existed and may be able to answer.

All in all it's a neat little feature.