Is the automatic question deletion routine broken?

Question

I believe Roomba (aka automatic question deletion) is broken.

While working on some delete vote therapy^(TM), I ran across 5 questions that met the criteria for being automatically deleted but had not been.

Per this answer and this answer the following criteria must be met.

• Criteria:
  • Closed more than 9 days ago
  • Not closed as a duplicate
  • Score <= 0
  • Not locked
  • No answers with a score > 0
  • No accepted answer
  • No pending reopen votes
  • No edits in the past 9 days

And all of these questions meet those criteria.

• binary-on-the-coat-of-arms-of-the-governor-general-of-canada (Progs 10k+ only link)

• what-are-media-tags-and-how-do-i-implement-them (Progs 10k+ only link)

• is-it-a-good-idea-to-learn-java-and-c-together (Progs 10k+ only link)

• where-did-code-complete-get-its-name-from (Progs 10k+ only link)

• what-is-the-most-intended-os-for-java-demographics-wise (Progs 10k+ only link)

But none of them were automatically deleted. Community members ended up deleting those questions.

---

And I posted to M.SE instead of MP.SE since the auto-deletion algorithm is universal to all SE sites, not just Programmers.

Answer 1

I've updated the query to check for nulls on the IsAnswered field - this will be deployed in the next build (rev 2014.6.16.1659, meta rev 2014.6.16.2312).

The query runs on a daily schedule, so may be a day or two before it kicks off.

Answer 2

Yes, it is broken. Not completely broken, but definitely broken.

Here's the query that implements those requirements you cite:

WHERE PostTypeId = 1 -- Question
    AND DeletionDate IS NULL -- Not already deleted
    AND MigrationDate IS NULL -- Not migrated

    AND ClosedDate < GETUTCDATE() - @deadlineDays -- Closed question - was closed before deadline

    AND Score <= 0 -- Low score
    AND LockedDate IS NULL -- Not locked
    AND AcceptedAnswerId IS NULL -- No accepted answer
    AND IsNull(LastEditDate, CreationDate) < GETUTCDATE() - @deadlineDays -- No edits to title or body in deadline date
    AND IsAnswered = 0 -- No answers with score > 0

Duplicate and reopen vote tests are omitted for brevity... and because the bug is in the last line quoted. IsAnswered is null on questions that've never had answers...

By my count, 246 questions should be deleted on Programmers once this is fixed, with comparable numbers on other sites and a bit over 9K on Stack Overflow.