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https://serverfault.com/questions/159509/printer-on-different-networkip-range-can-i-print-to-it

This question on Server Fault was just bumped to the front page like any other question that has no upvoted answers and is a bit old. The thing is, it's been locked. Shouldn't these be treated as "closed" questions and not be poked to the front page? The documentation says that locked and closed questions aren't bumped.

As of today, the question has been bumped every month, and received its last bump 2 days ago.

The whole point of bumping these posts is to get new contributions, but a locked post can't have any content added or revised.

Community bumped post


Edited: as of today, 2017-03-30, the same question is yet again bumped:

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  • 3
    Retagged as a bug, because documentation says locked questions are not supposed to be bumped.
    – user259867
    Aug 7, 2015 at 6:09
  • 3
    Also, this same question just got bumped again.
    – user259867
    Aug 7, 2015 at 6:10
  • I'm pretty sure ordinary lock does prevent auto bump, however in this case it's historical lock which is different. Retagged. /cc @Norm Aug 7, 2015 at 6:23
  • I confirm that the same question just got re-bumped today..
    – yagmoth555
    Mar 31, 2017 at 2:56

1 Answer 1

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The "documentation" was wrong; the guy who wrote that was full of crap.

As far as I can tell, the system has never stopped locked questions from being bumped - they just tend to not qualify for other reasons (no answers, deleted, etc.).

In fact, it's extremely unusual to end up with a locked question that has nothing better than 0-scored answers: out of the 1.9 million questions on Stack Overflow that qualify for bumping as I type this, there are exactly two that are locked - one for a "content dispute" and another for "off-topic comments". (I've now unlocked them both.)

Excluding Stack Overflow, there are only 7 locked, bumpable questions anywhere else on the network - all of them locked for "historical significance", which means they'll never stop being bumped since the answers can never be upvoted or downvoted. I reviewed and deleted all of them, which takes care of the immediate problem.

Long-term, the proper fix here is to ensure locking is used responsibly; there's rarely ever a reason to leave a question locked for months or years at a time, and even more rarely a reason to use "historical significance" on unanswered questions - I'll make a note to review the guidance in place here.

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