What happens to unanswered questions from deleted accounts?

Question

(By unanswered I mean with no accepted answer, as seen in the Unanswered tab.)

They're potentially bringing the numbers down in terms of completed questions.

Here are some oldies:

• Need Help: VS 2005 Properties Changing
• How to summarize view-components/widgets-information in a JAR-File?
• Microsoft Async RPC crash in Vista
• Silverlight 2 RTW Crashes IE7

Or even more pertinent, questions from deleted accounts with actually no answers posted. Examples:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/226529/problem-upgrading-custom-project-from-vs2005-to-vs2008
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/225190/how-do-i-export-cisco-ids-v6-1-signatures-to-excel
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/250422/does-installshield-support-resuming-if-a-software-update-stops-in-the-middle-th
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/239810/what-kind-of-data-to-collect-for-post-mortem-root-cause-analysis-thread-dumps-o

Thanks to balpha's SEDE magic, we now have the following statictics:

• 28,192 30270 unanswered questions from deleted accounts
• 89 96 unanswered questions with 0 answers from deleted accounts

Answer 1

I don't think it's particularly relevant whether the original asker is around or even deleted.

Just FYI the following things happen automatically every week:

1. auto-deletion of questions more than 30 days old with no answers, and -1 score or lower

2. auto-deletion of questions more than 365 days old with no answers, low views, <= 1 comments, and <= 0 score

Note that "days old" is defined by last activity so if someone edits the question on day 364.. it'll stick around for another year.

edit: for #2, after looking at your examples, I made two changes

1. I decided to also include posts with score of 1 where the original owner is deleted -- same criteria otherwise: AND (p.Score < 1 OR (p.Score < 2 and OwnerUserId is null))

2. I decided to use the CreationDate instead of LastActivityDate, so community poking a question (or a user editing it) does not give a doomed question 365 more days of zombie "life".

Answer 2

My proposal:

• 0 answers provided: If more than a month old: delete

• No accepted answer, some answers provided: encourage closing through voting (maybe add a closing choice like "user account deleted and the question is not noticeable enough to be worth keeping open")