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Going through old posts, I come across some questions which

  • Question is not OffTopic
  • Don't have any answer
  • Were asked more than a year or two earlier
  • OP's rep is low (<100)
  • Doesn't have proper code or the error message or the trace or just have one of those.

Those might be answered but what would be the use if there is no one accepting it or upvoting it? Also as I mentioned the OP is not active so there is no one to provide more info on the question.

What to do in such scenarios? Flag (maybe??), but what to flag for ?

I suggest there should be a new field in flagging that can be seleted to just delete these posts.

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    These questions should be left there. Maybe in future someone else might have the same problem. If enough rep he/she can edit the question, put a bounty on it and might get an answer.
    – juergen d
    Feb 26, 2013 at 12:26
  • "Too localized" suddenly springs to mind. Also, if those questions do not have any upvotes, they will be automatically deleted.
    – Time Traveling Bobby
    Feb 26, 2013 at 12:30

2 Answers 2

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If a question can't be answered because its quality is not high enough and the OP isn't around to provide clarification, it makes sense to remove it rather than answer it badly. Next time 'round, when someone else has the same problem, perhaps they'll be able to express it better and thereby prompt a higher quality answer.

If the question is something that gets asked as infrequently as once every few years, then dropping it will be no great loss.

Also, as an asker, if I found myself with the same question, I would want to post it as a fresh question anyway, so that I could earn votes for a high quality question, rather than edit the old question and help an idle account get those votes.

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StackOverflow is a Q&A site, but also a wiki meant to help people facing the same problem to solve it. Even if a question has been "dead" for a year or more, it still makes sense to answer the question when you can, so other people facing the same issue don't have to keep struggling with it.

The answer might not get accepted since the OP is long gone, but your fellow SO users can still upvote your answer, since the question will be bumped up to the top in the active sorted Questions page. So it's not all for nothing, there is still a point in handling old questions.

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