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TL;DR: Showing Community-user bumped questions to anonymous users is more likely to cause harm than good, isn't it? If this is correct, what should be asked and where (per-site-meta or Meta Stack Exchange)?

IIRC answering will not prevent a question to be bumped while the new answer doesn't get upvotes.

According to answer from Stack Overflow Meta, 2019, an adjustment was made to the algorithm. Previously the number of views increased the selection weight.

What options do we have when campaigns like "Vote early, vote often" don't work?

By default Community user "bumps" one question every hour.

Web Applications landing page for anonymous users

Computer Science landing page for anonymous users

This is done someway that makes the question appear as an active question when certain conditions are met:

  • the question and their answers have not recently been created or modified
  • the question is unanswered,
  • the questions have answers with no votes

On sites that have long quiet hours and a "low" percentage of answered questions, the landing page looks full of posts bumped by Community-user. IMO, from a community health POV, I understand the purpose of showing to registered users questions bumped by the Community-user as they might help with the site moderation/curation:

  • Suggest edit, requires rep +1.
  • Upvote, flag require rep +15.
  • Downvote, requires rep+125.
  • etc.

IMO, it is a problem that the landing page for anonymous users shows Community-user bumped posts when most of these questions aren't good questions. Anonymous users might upvote, and downvote but this doesn't help to avoid the question being bumped again later as upvotes and downvotes are recorded but don't affect the question score.

An extreme case that happens frequently in some sites is having a landing page full of broken windows which it's very likely to lead anonymous users to have a wrong idea about the scope and workings of the site. Those that are looking for help might post a question that is not a good fit for the site that will later be bumped taking the landing page to fall into a loop of bad questions and attracting more bad questions.

I don't know what should be asked as to have this improved significatively in the short term. I know that some per-site settings might be tailored but apparently, they affect how the algorithm makes the Communit-user bump questions.

Does it make sense to ask to show the "Month" view instead of the "Active view"? Is something like this feasible to do in the short term? I mean not requiring a big change to the database and user interface, consuming a lot of dev time, causing it to get assigned , meaning added it to the "long stay parking lot".

Is the only option to ask a CM to adjust the per-site settings to limit the number of questions to be bumped, i.e, set the number of questions to be bumped by hour to 0?

P.S. I don't know how to know how many anonymous users into the site homepage, how many of them create a question in the same session, etc. I know that this might be possible by using certain features of Google Analytics and similar tools but AFAIK this is not something available to any user (non-Staff).

Data for Some Sites

As of April 25, 2023. Data retrieved using a SEDE query, ran for some sites.

Max Bumps column shows the count of bumps of the Top 1 posts based on the count of bumps in descending order for posts bumped until the last SEDE update.

Site Posts Bumped in 2023 Max Bumps
Web Applications +100 46
Super User +100 45
Computer Science +100 44
Magento +100 43
Meta Stack Exchange 11 9
Writing 38 8

Related

From per-site-meta sites

Super User

Stack Overflow

From Stack Overflow Blog

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  • Well, on the smaller sites, isn't the alternative having questions from November 2022 toward the bottom of the page?
    – CDR
    Apr 23, 2023 at 16:19
  • 3
    The title of your question looks like basically a duplicate of What can cause a question to be bumped?. but then your actual question seems to be "What is the process to request a limit on Community bumps?" The links in your linked question Which sites impose limits on Community bumps, and what are those limits? seem to show what other sites have done in the past.
    – tripleee
    Apr 23, 2023 at 16:23
  • 2
    If you are asking "Should low-traffic sites default to fewer bumps" I'm all for it, but that doesn't actually seem to be your topic here.
    – tripleee
    Apr 23, 2023 at 16:25
  • 2
    What I mean is that if not for the bot bumping questions, really old questions would still show up on the active page on sites where relatively few questions are asked.
    – CDR
    Apr 23, 2023 at 16:32
  • 1
    @tripleee Thank you for your feedback. Please bear with me. Regarding the first statement, I disagree as this question is focused on anonymous users while the "possible duplicate target" doesn't mention this audience explicitly. Regarding the third statement, I agree but, IIRC they didn't analyze the case of specific users and the "conversion" of them in new users that posted their first question after landing on the "homepage". I will take a cup of coffee and look again at the links in your comment first, a bit later I will come back to you.
    – Rubén
    Apr 23, 2023 at 16:32
  • @tripleee: Added a TL;DR. The answer might result from a better understanding of the second link from your first comment, I'm not really sure.
    – Rubén
    Apr 23, 2023 at 19:16
  • @CDR your concern is fair. Please bear in mind that this is not a feature request but is asking about what should be asked. I think that the feature request, if any, should be an enhancement of the current per-site settings, to make it possible to fine-tune for sites with a low number of new questions per month.
    – Rubén
    Apr 23, 2023 at 19:19
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    I don't understand the problem here. Why wouldn't you want them bumped?
    – Rory Alsop
    Apr 24, 2023 at 15:03
  • @RoryAlsop What I don't want is that bumped questions be shown to anonymous users as most of them are potential new users. Bumped questions are very likely to be bad questions or the site might not have active users interested in them. I think that this might be a problem for sites having less than the 80% of answered questions.
    – Rubén
    Apr 24, 2023 at 17:07
  • 1
    Why do you think they are likely to be bad questions, @Rubén? All we know is they are questions that have been bumped.
    – Rory Alsop
    Apr 26, 2023 at 15:02

2 Answers 2

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I don't see it being a problem that anonymous users see questions bumped by Community. Having only one "active" homepage reduces the complexity of everything, from the code internally to our documentation here on meta. While anonymous (and very low-rep) users don't have most of the tools to effectively deal with those questions, they can still contribute answers, and with one upvote, the question will be officially "answered".

If there are too many Community-bumped questions on the homepage at once, that's a sign that the number allowed should be changed. It looks like the limit is usually 5 in the most recently active questions, which seems reasonable.

This is a problem when most of these questions aren't good questions.

For those with a little rep, there are enough ways to handle this, and those methods also prevent the question from being bumped:

  • Vote on the answers. If all the answers score less than 0, the question won't be bumped by Community. Having a positively scoring answer will also work, and if there's nothing wrong with the answers, this is the better option.
  • Flag non-answers for deletion.
  • Downvote bad questions. If it scores less than 0, it won't be bumped by Community.
  • Vote to close the question if it's off-topic.
  • If you have the expertise, you can also answer the question with enough finesse that everyone else decides to upvote you in spite of the question. Bad questions don't have to lead to bad answers. (Yeah, I already mentioned this, but it's worth repeating.)
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  • Thanks Laurel. What I have tried to say is that there might be a correlation between the number of bad first questions from new users and the posts bumped by Community-user. As there is no easy way to validate this for users like you and me due to the lack of details in the available data I think that it should be possible to implement a containment measure. This should be handled as a feature-request, very likely to be handled as on the corresponding per-site-meta but in order to make it possible, it might be required to first do something else.
    – Rubén
    Apr 23, 2023 at 19:26
  • I think that one thing that might be tried immediately is what you mentioned, the number allowed of Community-user bumped questions should be lowered. I need to review again this. Regarding "those with little rep" that implies making some sort of call to action. There have been efforts like "Vote early...", have contests, unfortunately, they require a core community or a certain mass of active users to be effective.
    – Rubén
    Apr 23, 2023 at 19:28
  • Cont. ... to overcome the bumped-posts-leads-to-bad-first-questions phenomenon (if such a thing exists).
    – Rubén
    Apr 23, 2023 at 19:34
  • By the way, answering will not prevent a question to be bumped while the answer doesn't get upvotes.
    – Rubén
    Apr 23, 2023 at 19:36
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The point is that someone does something about that.

In the specific case of Meta Stack Exchange, there is one question that was bumped by Community-User +30 times, there are 10 between 10 and 20. This might not be a big deal.

In the case of Web Applications, there are +100 that were bumped +20, some +40.

Here is a SEDE query that is an adaptation that might be used by the readers to review the site of their interest.

Considering the previous answer and the question score (-3 at this time) it might not make sense to create , instead review the questions and do the regular "moderation" (upvote, downvote, etc.).

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