"Nudge" feature

Question

There should be a feature where if your question meets certain specs, you can nudge your question back towards the top of the question lists.

Possible ideas for requirements to be able to 'nudge':

• Question has not received any new answers within a time period (a day?)
• Low number of views during a given time frame (several days?)
• Question does not have a negative vote (ie. has not been down-voted more than up-voted)
• Question has nod been nudged in some time (a day or two?)
• Question does not have any answers with a large number of up-votes (audience acceptance)
• Question has not been locked from nudges by admins or by vote
• A maximum number of 'nudges' per question has not been reached

Obvious options:

• It is your own question
• Some minimum rep requirement
• Rep cost (as in down-voting)

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Note: I am not suggesting to have all of these measures in place, merely bringing ideas to the table... I don't think I even agree with all of them. =)

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The purpose of this would be to allow users to quietly bring an unanswered question back to the table after the question has fallen into obscurity (really, how many people go through questions that are more than a few days old?). I think many of us may have asked a question at some point in time that essentially dissapeared (as far as a public audience is concerned) after the initial surge of views (and potentially answers that you don't think are quite what you are looking for). This, if implemented well, would make it so that unanswered questions that are still of importance can be given another chance, while unimportant or answered questions still fade away... A huge benefit to the person asking the question, and I suppose a somewhat smaller benefit to whomever is out searching for questions to answer, since the important ones will tend to stay on top.

Another possibility is to be able to nudge other peoples questions in case you found a similar existing problem, but are not satisfied with the given answers... If this would be allowed some method of marking the question as 'nudged by such and such a user' would have to be available, along with a way for the user who nudged the question to append their own reasons for nudging it so the community can help them (ie, clarification of an answer, unsatisfied with previous answers, slight change from the original question, etc...).

I know we already have the 'bounty' feature, but I think that this is a separate system from that, and has its own benefits.

Answer 1

Well, this already exists, really..

• the community user bumps (n) unanswered posts per hour to the front page. Unanswered is defined as no answers with upvotes.

• edits to your question bump the question to the front page.

• new answers bump the question to the front page.

• edits to answers bump the question to the front page.

• after 2 days you can issue a rep bounty on a question which keeps it on the "Featured" tab on the front page for 7 days

The general philosophy is here:

Getting attention for unanswered questions?

Answer 2

Users can "nudge" questions by posting comments in them telling that they wanted to bump the question up.

I think the danger with having a specific nudge feature (with a press of a button) is that the recent question list will become broken when everyone and their mom would want to nudge their question. At least posting a comment requires some kind of active interaction.