I often see old questions on Stack Overflow - some are just plain bad, some have been asked at that time of day when no one is around except for RBS staff trying to frantically fix autosys, and some have clearly been asked when Jon Skeet* is on holiday. Some of them are just really hard.
The bad questions should be consigned to the dustbin, but those other questions, they might deserve another chance, and I'm wondering if, with a little (well, lots) of help from the community, we could promote them with a bounty offered by StackExchange itself. The purpose of this bounty would really be to promote these questions a bit more, or even just get them noticed again.
This started as a side comment on this question
@BilltheLizard Why not get people to review old unanswered questions, and if they are good questions, StackExchange itself could offer a bounty on them? – dash 31 mins ago
@dash That's an idea. I can think of a few different ways that could work. Users could nominate questions for bounties, and after 5 nominations in a given time period a 100 point bounty is set. We'd need a separate tab for nominated questions to be viewed before they're moved to the featured tab. Another option would be that questions that stay at the top of the unanswered list for a certain period could automatically get a bounty. You should post this as a separate feature request. – Bill the Lizard
In short, it's an attempt at suggesting a solution for the following:
...getting answers for the 20% of questions on SO that are currently unanswered, which I care about a lot. I'd love to hear more ideas on the latter if you have them. @BillTheLizard
*I'm using Jon Skeet in the context of meaning all the experts on StackExchange. Although it could just as easily be the Jon Skeet ;-)