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As everyone knows, the size of the review queue for close votes is an issue, even now that its displayed length is fuzzy.

While reviewing I often encounter questions with a negative score that have no upvoted answer. As I understand, such questions are automatically pruned after one week.

I think therefore that it is useless to add those questions to the review queue. They unnecessarily consume the time and attention of the reviewers.

Do you agree or do you see a valid reason for their presence in the review queue ?

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    "with a negative score that have no upvoted answer" is not a cause for auto-deletion. If the question has an answer with whatever score, and is not closed, it will not be automatically deleted.
    – How About a Nice Big Cup of
    Commented Mar 15, 2014 at 15:17

3 Answers 3

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There are multiple scripts that delete questions.

9 days

The fastest of them is described in Turbocharging the Roomba: solutions for premature deletion which runs on closed questions after 9 days that have a score less than zero with no answers with a score greater than zero, no accepted answer, no edits in the last 9 days and no reopen votes.

30 days

At 30 days, another script described in Enable automatic deletion of old, unanswered zero-score questions after a year? runs which deletes questions that are -1 or lower, and no answers. This doesn't 'care' if the question was closed or not or what the close reason was.

365 days

At 1 year, yet another script described in Enable automatic deletion of old, unanswered zero-score questions after a year? is run which deletes questions that have a score of 0 (or 1 if the owner is deleted), no answers, and a low view count with 0 or 1 comments.

So, its quite easy for there to be a question that doesn't have any up voted answers to be in the queue - answers will cause the 30 and 365 day scripts to not delete the question.

If there are no answers, its still a good thing to close it rather than waiting for the 30 day script to delete it because it will prevent other poor answers from being added to the question.

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Voting and closing are two different things; those questions are not yet closed and thus can still receive answers.

Only closing them would stop them from receiving answers, as that could otherwise prevent their deletion.

And some of those posts are perhaps perfectly on-topic, even clear, but are just low quality. Those posts could still deserve getting an answer and you should vote to leave those posts open.

So, no, we should definitely still list such questions in the queue. Voting on those posts is still a task that needs to be dealt with, irrespective of their future chances of deletion.

And besides, if they do get auto-deleted, they'll disappear from the voting queue as well, they won't clutter up the queue forever.

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  • "They do not clutter up the review queue forever" This raises another question : how come that there are 2 years ago questions right next to today's questions in the queue ? Is this 100% random or is there an order in priority ?
    – Lorenz Meyer
    Commented Mar 15, 2014 at 14:59
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    @LorenzMeyer: not all old questions are autodeleted, or have their votes auto-expired. Low-view questions don't get enough attention, so close votes on those remain around until properly reviewed.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Commented Mar 15, 2014 at 15:00
  • @LorenzMeyer: see Close Votes expire too soon for low-traffic tags
    – Martijn Pieters
    Commented Mar 15, 2014 at 15:01
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Suppose a question is downvoted because it is off topic, at the same time it is flagged as such.

If it is not in the close review queue, maybe it gets a helpful answer.

At this point the user got help : a first goal is achieved.
On the other hand, the question is no longer nominated for automatic deletion. Because of the close flag, it would now enter the close review queue. SO will still get cleaned : the second goal is also reached.

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    We don't want to encourage people asking low-quality off-topic questions either, which is why we close such posts. If the OP got their answer anyway, why would they bother to learn about how a site works?
    – Martijn Pieters
    Commented Mar 15, 2014 at 13:54
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    So, you wait with preventing bad answers until the question gets a bad answer? Genius...
    – John Dvorak
    Commented Mar 15, 2014 at 14:25
  • @jan If the question gets a bad answer, it still will be automatically deleted... But at least I can now comprehend the reason why it works as it does.
    – Lorenz Meyer
    Commented Mar 15, 2014 at 15:04
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    No, any answer prevents auto deletion of an open question. If the question is closed, it'll only be deleted if the answers have a negative score as well.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Commented Mar 15, 2014 at 16:33
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    Note that the first goal of Stack Exchange is that it helps the next person to find the question. Poor questions with poor answers don't help the next person.
    – user213963
    Commented Mar 15, 2014 at 18:36

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