Enable automatic deletion of old, unanswered, zero-score questions after a year?

Question

Related to Meta Super User efforts:

Old unanswered inactive questions with low views/votes

and Meta Server Fault efforts:

Cleaning house, really old, unloved questions

We already auto-remove negatively voted unanswered old questions automatically after 30 days, network wide, with no human intervention required.

I was thinking we might extend that to remove old, unanswered zero score questions... based on the following criteria:

• fewer than (question age in days * 1.5) views
• 0 score or lower, or 1 score or lower if the original author is deleted
• no answers
• 1 comment or fewer
• asked more than 1 year ago (thus based on creation date, not last activity date, so Community poking a question, or a user editing it, does not give a doomed question 365 more days of zombie "life")

See the results of this query on:

Stack Overflow (10509) | Server Fault (787) | Super User (650)

This query has been refined based on the comments, and this is the final version that will roll out tonight. Every site in the network (except metas) will automatically delete old questions that meet this criteria from this point forward.

Answer 1

Abandoned, unanswered questions can be a nuisance for readers when they appear in search results. While every question deserves a chance to be answered, at some point the annoyance to those searching for a solution outweighs the increasingly small chance that an answer will be provided.

For this reason, the Community user will automatically delete old abandoned / dead questions in the following circumstances:

If the question is more than 30 days old, and ...

• has −1 or lower score
• has no answers
• is not locked
• has not been migrated from another site

...or...

• it was closed and migrated to a different site (i.e. it is a migration stub)

...or...

• it was migrated from a different site, and then rejected

... it will be automatically deleted. Internally, these are termed "dead" questions (RemoveDeadQuestions, RemoveMigrationStubs in the case of a migration stub, or RemoveRejectedMigrations in the case of a rejected migration).

For this criterion only, when calculating the question's score, only downvotes that were cast more than two days ago are considered. This is to prevent serial downvotes from causing automatic deletions and allow the voting fraud scripts to run before the checks above run.

If the question is more than 365 days old, and ...

• has a score of 0 or less, or a score of 1 or less in case the owner's account is deleted
• has no answers
• is not locked
• has view count <= the age of the question in days times 1.5
• has 1 or 0 comments
• isn't on a meta site

... it will be automatically deleted. These are "abandoned" questions (RemoveAbandonedQuestions).

These checks are run every week across all sites.

If the question was closed more than 9 days ago, and ...

• not closed as a duplicate
• has a score of 0 or less
• is not locked
• has no answers with a score > 0
• has no accepted answer
• has no pending reopen votes
• has not been edited in the past 9 days
• has not been migrated from another site

... it will be automatically deleted. These are "abandoned closed", and show as RemoveAbandonedClosed.

This check is run every day across all sites.

---

The particular script which applied to a given question is shown in the timeline entry for its deletion, in the "comment" column:

See also: The official "How does deleting work? What can cause a post to be deleted, and what does that actually mean?" FAQ meta post.

Answer 2

I would prefer a crowdsourced approach, because I fear a purely algorithmic solution will never cover enough dead content to actually make a difference.

How about expanding the scope to:

• 200 views (although I'm not sure I see the point of a view limit at all. A crap question doesn't get better when viewed 500 times, and negatively voted questions often get looked at a lot just for the entertainment value)
• Last activity more than six months ago (or even three)
• Has 0 score or lower, or 1 score with at least 1 downvote (to catch pity upvotes)
• Has no answers with more than 1 upvote
• Has no accepted answer (obviously)

and instead of deleting them, relaxing the "vote to delete" rules for those questions say to two required 2k+ votes instead of five, and having the community user bump a steady trickle of them to the front page? Like, one every five minutes. For most users, they will come up only if they're in their interesting tags, so they will hardly be noticed.

Maybe mark them with a message like

This question has seen very little activity in the past x months, has a low vote score, and is unlikely to improve. If you consider this question useless in its current state, please consider casting a vote to delete.

Answer 3

238 seemed very few... I've been lurking round the Ant tag for a while, and expected there should be some of those questions showing up, but there are none. Playing with the query led to the discovery that changing

p.AnswerCount < 1

to

( p.AnswerCount < 1 OR p.AnswerCount IS NULL ) 

increased the yield from 238 to around 6 600, and brought in some of the Ant questions I expected to see. I think these are very likely to be safe to delete.

To try and gauge what viewcount would be a valid cutoff I removed that criterion - the result was ~12000 candidates, of which 119 had 1000 views or more.

Inverting the sort, so that highest number of views are shown first was interesting: three zero-vote no-answer questions, all with over 10K views, all mergees. Followed by only 9 more questions with over 2K5 views. Clicking through those revealed mostly merged and closed, but one or two that might be worth keeping, plus some woeful tagging (just serial-port?).

In the 'mid range' ~500 views - there's again mostly cruft.

For stale zero-answer zero-vote questions from OP accounts that have been closed, the view count doesn't matter - the question can be deleted. I think there should be some onus on the OP to 'tend to their questions needs' - if the OP has not logged in to the site for some period (6 months?) then these ought to be candidates for deletion, probably with looser criteria.

For active users with 'stale' questions, why not e-mail them saying their question is a deletion candidate, giving them a chance to try and salvage it?

Edit: another take on this:

How about joining to the Users table and using a 90-day cutoff, applying to the post and user activity? (An outer join shows more matches, presumably as for some posts the OP account has been removed.) There are 16 000 of these with under 100 views, rising to 21 000 if the limit is 500 views (i.e. almost 10% of the headline SO unanswered population). Looking at the high-view questions they do seem pretty dead - no obvious difference to the ones with few views - remember these

• have no answers
• have no upvotes
• and the OP hasn't been active in three months

... so their prospects for revival aren't good. The SO 'ZUV-ZA' questions, older than 90 days, have accumulated 1.7 million views in total.

Answer 4

We've been trying several things on SU to find such redundant questions. My findings were:

• Views are not always very important, especially if there are no or few upvotes. If 200 users that actually took the effort of looking at a question didn't find it interesting enough to upvote, it's probably not worth answering to begin with. Furthermore, if everyone reading this question starts 'investigating' and looking at these low view questions, they won't be low viewed for much longer...

• Votes on the question aren't important if there are no answers. This often indicates that while the question is 'interesting', the user often is asking for the impossible. Either way, no answer means it's probably no longer worth it to visit the question.

• No activity of the OP. A lot of these 'crappy' questions are asked by drive-by users who ask only one question and are never seen again. This means they never provide requested feedback and never accept an answer (if any). If you check for questions asked by users who haven't been on the site for x months (we tried 12 to be safe) and the question had 'low' views, no (upvoted) answers or wasn't upvoted itself, they can go.

• We don't need one query to delete everything, because if there's one thing we found its that there are many variations of bad questions. Low views + no upvotes + no answers. Some upvotes + no active OP + no answers. By checking for multiple conditions we can find a broader range of questions, without resorting to complex queries.

More generally, we should wonder that if a question hasn't gotten any worthy answers or attention, what's the point of keeping them around? Some problems get solved, because people learn to deal with it, update the software or just get outdated. I would simply start deleting them after several months, because the chances of someone solving it after such a long time are simply too small. Sure it happens, sometimes, but should we keep so much crap around just for those edge cases?

Perhaps in the future users should get a message that their question hasn't received much attention and that it will be deleted automatically unless they will add more information to get it answered. My guess is that most users would think: I don't care about the question anymore, you might as well delete it. If not, then they'd better show that they can make it worthwhile, else it would still get deleted the next month.

The most important thing is that it's a privilege to ask a question here, if you're not willing to improve your question to help others help you, than your question isn't worth keeping around. Because in the end, users come to our sites to find an answer, if we can't provide one than we shouldn't lure them in here either!

Which I think is also a reason to automatically delete all (non-duplicate) closed questions after a certain period where the decision could be appealed. After that they are a dead end and useless to the site.

Answer 5

For those of you, who are also "moderators" of a small community around a less frequently used tag, you may want to check that the generally low view count in that community doesn't lead to the deletion of valid, yet unanswered questions.

I've created a data explorer query that allows you to see the unanswered questions for your tag that might be auto-deleted soon.

If this reveals questions you want to save from deletion, you could do so by casting an upvote.

Answer 6

Another suggested set of criteria...

I've actually been trying to do a little tidying-up for my tag of choice lately and have been deleting many questions that meet this criteria:

• no answers
• a few months old (i.e. no real activity lately)
• closed (but generally not if it was closed as a duplicate, unless it's an exact repost, since duplicates still seem to be considered valuable)

If it has no answers and it's closed then it certainly won't be getting any more. The views and votes seem kind of irrelevant in such a case: if the views and votes were both high but the question still wasn't able to muster a reopening, it probably deserves to be put down.

Answer 7

I would favor a moderation based approach. It's not a lot of questions to deal with on an ongoing basis (ie, having 238 over 30 months is only 1-2 new unanswered questions per week).

It would be nice if these questions were emphasized. Perhaps dropped into a "unloved questions" bin in some set of moderation tools available to 3k+ users. They can then either choose to close them, edit them, or answer them in the hopes of getting a few rep and perhaps a necro badge.

But the load of these particular questions is low, and one year is a long time. I'd rather such questions be dealt with in a month so we reduce the number of people shunted from google to here to find an unanswered question. Further, I'd propose that the more views it gets, the more important it is to make sure it's either answered or closed. We shouldn't let these dangling questions dangle potential users.

Answer 8

Starting completely from scratch with the new query If care what I said before, look in the edit history.

Some of the question that come up are badly tagged:

• open RDL Report which has Subreport in c#.net just tagged subreport.
• Running TinyOS SerialForwarder and Oscilloscope displays blank screen just tagged tinyos
• Oracle Apps Order Management How to pick release using the standard API. just tagged aplication
• a very long, only partially formatted text about the Oracle HRMS API For Business Groups tagged only api

All of these are ill-written pleas for help with something the author seems to have no clue about. By now they have either solved the problem or given up, and the low number of views suggest not too many other people having the same trouble.

No great harm if they are removed.

---

Looking for one in tags I sometimes visit I find

• Someone having trouble reading the Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide. Way above my head, but I suspect he's asking about a routine he shouldn't be calling directly.
• A closed off topic question about the Mac OS command line from before migration to Super User was possible.
• A question about forcing Korn shell to change the format it saves its history in. Better on Unix, now, I guess.
• A question about using QEMU. It's presented as a "scripting" question but the user simply seems confused about how to accomplish the task to the command line.

In addition to this a lot of the titles and tagging paterns look suspiciously off-topic to me.

I haven't look at enough posts to be definitive, but I see nothing to make me suspect this list is full of stuff we don't want to lose.

Answer 9

I found this to be related to a question I asked a while back: Option to order unanswered questions by fewest views per time?

In a comment to the answer I got from Robert Harvey I wrote the following:

If a question has many views, but no answers, then it might be because the question is too hard. If the question has no answers and no views, it might just be that no one has seen the question. Also if someone looks at a question in the view it would be moved further down the list, so it would always be the questions that has been shown the least attention that turns up in this view.

That comment summarizes the problem pretty well. If you need more context you could always take a look at the question.

I don't oppose to auto-deleting old, unanswered zero-score questions after a year, but I believe that my proposal could significantly reduce the number of unanswered zero-score questions.

Until today I was unaware of the existence of http://data.stackexchange.com. I'm not familiar with stackoverflow's database schema and I don't work with SQL on a daily basis, so I figure that someone else could implement my query much faster than I could.

If I could ask for two things those would be: my proposed view implemented as a query on http://data.stackexchange.com, so that I and others can see what kind of questions are returned to evaluate the usefulness of such a view; and a comment from Jeff Atwood, just to know if he thinks it's something that will be implemented.

EDIT: Managed to compose the following query: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/s/1125/least-noticed-questions

I guess it will be more useful if you filter it to only include tags of your interest. You probably also want to exclude questions with accepted answers.

Answer 10

A lot of these seem to be cases where a brand new user posted a question. There were some comments asking for more detail. And then nothing ever happened again.

I would suggest first deleting these items.
Then secondly, possibly widening the view count criteria to 200 and only deleting items where the asker has had no activity since that question or if it is the asker's only question.

Answer 11

The entire point of this is to “reduce noise” when searching. Then why not do that?

Instead of deleting questions the search results should be partitioned into positive score, zero score, and negative score results.

Then you can keep all the “non positive noise” and nobody would notice it since they can still efficiently search as if there was no noise.

Moreover folks interested in zero vote and downvoted content STILL have the opportunity to dig through and find things of value.

The classic case “good case” I can imagine is a zero score question (because it’s niche not because it’s poor) being answered 10+ years after it was asked. I have personally engaged in activities resembling this.

I’m not sure about stackoverflow but this kind of thing is truly common over at math.stackexchange, mathoverflow, and physics.stackexchange. Judging by how many unanswered zero vote questions with >2 comments there are.

Answer 12

For my own digging around I'm getting an idea as to the function needed to identify crappy questions worthy of purging. A lot of the ideas have already been mentioned here, but one I discovered on SF was views-per-month. That's a better proxy than absolute views paired with date.

The hazard is purging dated information that'll be useful for people actually looking for legacy information. That's why questions with zero answers are considered. My own query uses zero-or-one, but that's for hand viewing things; I wouldn't recommend using that as an auto-purge yet. It has been an interesting exploration.

A suite of search-queries would work best for this problem.

• Low-quality questions ignored by the search-engines (what I was driving for)
• Questions posted by drive-bys with little or no uptake by other users
• Pre-migration off-topic closes (move-to-SF/SU wasn't always possible! Close those old Questions). Probably a one-time query.

As we continue to purge thank-you/anyone-fix-this?/incoherence answers, some of these older questions will become zero-answered. There are a couple of SF users that seem to be making an effort to mod-flag those questions, and I appreciate the work.

Answer 13

Portions of question l posted in Ask Ubuntu:

I found three Q&A's addressing "Abandoned Questions" in Ask Ubuntu Meta:

• What to do with questions whose OP hasn't visited the site for a long time?
• What to do when users have been inactive for months and their question remain open?
• What to do with abandoned questions?

Other ones I've just discovered on July 31, 2017 but not yet reviewed:

• Changes to how we close abandoned questions
• Closing abandoned questions is harder than it should be.
• Can moderators confirm abandoned questions should be closed TL, not NARQ?
• Another bit on abandoned questions, but specifically good ones with good answers
• Why don't we have "required/requested input not provided" close reason for abandoned questions?
• Time Frame of Abandoned/Old Questions
• Question deleted as abandoned although I didn't abandon it

As you can see there used to be a great deal of interest in "Abandoned Questions".

Additionally there is:

• How should we define "Abandoned" as a close reason?

In attempts to deal with abandoned questions I wrote a SEDE query and started to go through and close vote ones that were unanswered questions >5 years old and therefore dealing with an EOL (End of Life) version of Ubuntu. As such it would be impossible to duplicate the OP's problem without installing an EOL version.

Although for some questions the OP hasn't signed on in 5+ years, in many other cases it's been > 6 months since OP signed on. In other cases I was able to comment to OP and ask if problem was still there. Many times the OP replied it wasn't reproducible and I voted to close the question as such.

However with not enough queue reviewers the Close Vote queue quickly filled up. As such close voting thousands of abandoned questions on EOL versions (prior to Ubuntu 14.04) is not viable. This led to my Ask Ubuntu meta question:

• What are the acceptable number of close votes to initiate per day?

Therefore I'd be very keen to see a Community Bot created that we could actively participate in defining the parameters for.