###Summary Instead of immediately bumping a question, questions that qualify for special bumping behaviour shall be placed in a queue and sequentially auto-bumped by the system at a rate proportional to the site's current activity level.
This system satisfies all the given requirements:
- The homepage will not be flooded with old retagged questions
- All edits will still have the opportunity for peer review (although not necessarily immediately)
- A retagger can now work at maximum efficiency at any time of the day
- There would be no GUI additions; this is purely a back-end change
- The system is well-defined, and is (what I perceive as) relatively easy to implement
and, most importantly,
- Makes everyone involved happy! Except possibly Jeff Atwood. :D</sup
Based on this questionthis question, several concerns were raised about the retagging that goes on, particularly on Stack Overflow. As I mentioned in that question, the current system does not allow those of us who want to organize to do our job as effectively as we could. I am proposing a system that allows us to be more productive members of the community while allowing full transparency of our actions.
###Requirements
- The homepage must be usable 24/7 (i.e., flooding of old questions should be minimized)
- All edits should have the opportunity for peer review (as it is now), which minimizes the possibility of abuse of this type of system
- Improve the editing efficiency of a retagger, particularly when the site is in a period of low activity (i.e., minimize self-edit-throttling)
- Very lightweight as far as usability/GUI goes
- As simple to implement as possible, so it gets finished sooner than 6-8 weeks from now
###The System For questions, edits and editors that meet a certain criteria (see below), the bumping behaviour of questions shall be modified such that instead of bumping immediately, a question shall be put into a queue (the Bump Queue), and at periodic intervals (the site's current Bump Rate), a question will be removed from the front of the Queue and bumped automatically.
Questions shall only be placed in the Bump Queue if all of the following criteria are met:
- The edit is done on a question
- The question has not been edited (including queued edits) within the last 7 days
- The edit only affects the question's tags
- The edit does not create any new tags
- The editor has at least 3,000 reputation
Should these criteria not be met, the question shall be bumped immediately as is currently implemented.
If a question currently in the Bump Queue is edited again, the question shall be moved to the end of the Queue if the above criteria are met; or, if the criteria are not met, the question shall be bumped immediately.
The average Bump Rate of the Queue shall be tuned through community consensus on a per-site basis, and vary in real time proportional to the site's current activity rate (# questions asked + # of immediate-bump edits per unit of time).
For Stack Overflow in particular, I suggest an average Bump Rate of approximately 1 bump every 5 minutes, which allows for a daily bumping "capacity" of 288 questions (plenty), while maintaining an acceptable level of flood control (at peak times, the homepage would only have perhaps 5-6 old questions visible at once).
