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See the LATEST ACTIVITY in the right bar. Currently it shows misleading information.

See Debate Society. Latest activity shows Jun 30 '10 at 4:02, but the proposal has more recent activity. See recent followers (Nov 12 '10 at 0:59), comments (Sep 5 '10 at 19:40). I can't see when the last vote was cast but I'm pretty sure it wasn't 6 months ago. That proposal is not a single example, there are hundreds more. Another one is The Practicing Musician.

This report originated from What's the time necessary for a proposal get deleted on Area 51? See comments on Robert's answer, especially the last one.

Is it a bug or by-design? For me it's a bug because it provides misleading information.

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"Latest Activity" is supposed to reflect the last time the proposal itself changed, so you can at-a-glance see if there's something new for you to do / see here. That includes edits to the title and audience, or new example questions so you can take a look and vote on them. It doesn't include followers / comments / votes, since there's nothing for you to do when those are added.

When we do the query for "no activity in over a month" to delete dead proposals, we are more liberal and include new followers and votes, since that means the proposal isn't dead yet.

I don't think there's a need to make Latest Activity the same as in that query, since this isn't really something we want users to think about or try to game. If a proposal isn't getting any activity for a month, it's not going to work as a site and you're only wasting your time trying to ping it every few weeks to keep it alive.

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  • Although I think this is a misleading information I can understand. Unfortunately users are gaming the system just posting a comment to keep the proposal live.
    – Maniero
    Commented Jan 7, 2011 at 17:20
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    @bigown: (1) I see no evidence of wide-spread commenting to (uselessly) to keep a proposal around. I delete thousands of them so non-organic efforts to preserve the random, ill-conceived proposal is likely to be futile, but harmless. (2) I agree with @David; the calculations have two completely separate purposes. I'm more likely to simply change the wording in the FAQ so "latest activity" does not get confused with determining if a proposal has been completely abandoned.
    – Robert Cartaino
    Commented Jan 7, 2011 at 17:33
  • @Robert: I agree that the problem is not wide-spread, I just said that it exists.
    – Maniero
    Commented Jan 7, 2011 at 18:30

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