Option allow users to suggest a question is bumped without having to edit it

Question

On Stack Overflow we see a lot of "answers" to old questions that are of the form:

Have you got a solution for this yet?

Usually where the question has no other answers.

This, of course, has the effect of bumping the question to the home page where it gets more views and might even get a real answer.

It also has the effect of causing the answer author a temporary loss in reputation due to the down-votes it inevitably receives (until the answer is deleted) and, more importantly, NAA flags which we mods have to clear up. If the user does this enough they'll even end up with an automatic answer ban due to the number of low quality deleted answers they have provided.

To stop the bad behaviours but still retain the possibly beneficial bumping would it be possible to have a "bump" option on question. This will add the question to a queue and if it gets enough bump votes from other users Community will bump the question.

Obviously a user can only vote to bump a question once, or at least once in a long while, to avoid people continually trying to bump the same question.

I'm not sure how many votes would be required to initiate the bump, certainly more than one, but certainly not too many otherwise the option would be virtually useless.

Also, we'd probably want a "I'm having this problem too" button right next to the "Answer" button (thanks. Christian) as it's most likely to be new users unfamiliar with how SE works who add such answers. By putting the option right in their faces we should be able to get them to use it rather than the answer box.

Answer 1

I like the idea of users being able to influence Community bumps (on one of my sites we could do with more variety among the bumpees), but we shouldn't increase the amount of bumping or enable abuse. I suggest that we allow user input to nominate unanswered questions that otherwise qualify for bumping.

The current rules for Community bumps are (emphasis mine):

• The Community user will bump non-negatively scored, open questions every hour that have at least one answer scoring 0 and none scoring more than that.
  • Questions are picked randomly from the top-viewed questions with new activity more than 30 days ago.
  • The maximum number of unanswered questions bumped per hour depends on the site: 4 per hour on Stack Overflow, 2 per hour on Super User and Server Fault, and 1 per hour on Meta Stack Exchange and all other sites.

The linked post says it's a random choice from the top 100 qualifying questions. It's an old post; I don't know if that's still the number.

You're describing (and I've seen, too) cases where the question has no answer and somebody types in the answer textbox to ask about it. Unanswered questions don't currently qualify for bumping, probably because the intent of bumping includes reviewing possibly-neglected answers that, if upvoted, would move a question off the "unanswered" tab.

But bumping is also meant more generally for community review. It seems reasonable to allow users to nominate non-negative-scoring, open questions for bumping. Sometimes those questions are hard but interesting, and bumping them is valuable. If the questions aren't actually good, bumping will probably produce either downvotes (won't be bumped again) or edits (fixed, yay!).

Proposal: clicking on the "I'm having this problem too" button (or whatever the UI affordance is for "bump please") on an unanswered eligible question adds the question to the pool from which bumps are chosen. It stays in the pool until bumped or disqualified. If it's already in the pool, additional votes don't change anything -- so the risk of abuse is low, and the "expected value" is that you'll probably see the bump in the next 2-3 days (no guarantees). When it's bumped, it has to wait 30 days (like current bumped questions) before it can be bumped again.

Meanwhile, clicking that "I'm having this problem too" button (on any question) could generate a pop-up notice (like the kind you get when you try to vote but can't) that points to the help topic what should I do if nobody answers my question?.

I'm saying "I'm having this problem too" button because the question suggested it, but that's just a placeholder for some sort of not too invasive, but still noticable UI to be determined. Whatever it is, it should be near the answer textbox. This is a high-level sketch, not a design.