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The help page here on MSE about the roomba says that abandoned questions older than 365 days are deleted in certain cases as RemoveAbandonedQuestions. While this is true on main Q&A sites, as per Why aren't abandoned questions deleted on meta sites?, this does not apply on meta sites, including Meta Stack Exchange.

Please edit the MSE help page to remove this criterion, since it doesn't apply here.

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  • @Shog9 The entire paragraph should be removed, since the page is specific to MSE and it contradicts "check is run on all sites".
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Dec 14, 2017 at 2:17
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    That's just not gonna happen. Modifying it only for meta creates a override for meta. Which means if other parts of the article need to be edited, we have to edit every single version of the article to make those changes. We avoid using overrides whenever possible, and simply mentioning that one part doesn't apply to Meta is far better than creating an override to remove it for Meta.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Dec 14, 2017 at 2:18
  • @animuson I thought all sites had their own separate pages, I didn't know that that same page was used network-wide. But at least fix the contradiction, perhaps by using my version that I edited into Jeff's answer.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Dec 14, 2017 at 2:20

2 Answers 2

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I added a bullet a few days ago to that specific rule, since it's the only one that has this particular requirement.

  • isn't on a meta site

In addition to what animuson said in the comments (that we don't want to maintain site-specific pages unless absolutely necessary), there are a few other practical reasons why I went with this option:

  1. This exception isn't specific to MSE; it applies to all meta sites. But other meta sites don't have their own help center; they rely on the main site's version. So there's no possibility to override them even if we really, really wanted to maintain 170 versions of this topic.

  2. Conceptually, child metas are a part of their parent site (hence the shared help center). So treating them specially here is just confusing.

  3. The notes that contain the phrase "all sites" apply to the rule sets - in this case plural - immediately following them. Only one of those rule sets treats meta questions specially.

  4. The only reason this help center page exists at all is so that we have something to link to from the note below questions that have been automatically deleted. As such, the vast, vast majority of people reading it are those who've participated on a question that has definitely qualified for one or more of the rules. It's therefore important that they be given a convenient means of identifying the specific criteria that led to their question's removal.

    The population of people reading that page in hopes of identifying why their question hasn't been deleted, OTOH, currently consists of you.

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  • How many questions exist on metas that meet the criteria had it applied on meta sites?
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Dec 14, 2017 at 5:53
  • No idea. Probably lots; you can query for it easily enough.
    – Shog9 Mod
    Commented Dec 14, 2017 at 5:55
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The help page, network-wide, has been updated to add a new bullet:

If the question is more than 365 days old, and ...

  • has a score of 0 or less, or a score of 1 and a deleted owner
  • has no answers
  • is not locked
  • has view count <= the age of the question in days times 1.5
  • has 1 or 0 comments
  • isn't on a meta site
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  • Why is this being downvoted?
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Dec 14, 2017 at 2:34
  • self-answers, although allowed and encouraged, are disliked by some users, even so much they want to spend a vote on it. Beside that, you could have gone with a request to have the tag status-completed added to your question, it doesn't need to have an answer. It might be perceived as you're only here for the rep. Or blame Tim for losing his keys again but you won't hear that from me as that joke also sets people off. So you can't win, assuming this is a virtual game we play, which it isn't. This is all bloody serious.
    – rene Mod
    Commented Dec 14, 2017 at 7:18
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    @rene The only reason I posted the self-answer was because Shog added the status-completed tag immediately after I posted the question, and didn't post an answer at the time.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Dec 14, 2017 at 7:22
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    Your reasoning doesn't matter. The down voters don't care about your intent.
    – rene Mod
    Commented Dec 14, 2017 at 7:25

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