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How many bumps is too many?

Is there a limit to the number of times "Community user" can bump a question? There are questions with one or more unvoted answers that do not attract views, that do not attract the attention of hi-rep users, that do not attract upvotes for several years.

Curiously, questions that have not received any answer or where an answer was submitted but later deleted, are never bumped by the system.

Questions can be bumped by the system (i.e. “community”) for two reasons:

  1. There are no upvoted answers
  2. The OP did not accept an answer.

On the smaller sites this can be quite annoying, the same post can resurface month after month for years on end.

How to stop the bumping

Solutions include; upvoting an answer that is half-decent, downvoting the OP, voting to close the OP, or posting an answer in the hope of it being upvoted. But still, after years of being bumped, month after month, when is it time to put a post to rest, once and for all?

If I've understood correctly, some sites impose restrictions on the number of questions Community user can bump on a given day. But I am talking about the number of years a question can be bumped. According to one commenter, the buck stops here, i.e. with the community.

No limit, people should vote to sort the problem out, and rare exceptions have been made.

Bump bonus:

  • What is the most bumped question in the history of the Stack Exchange network?

References:

  1. Should we change Community's bumps according to the amount of times a question has *already* been bumped
  2. Way to know when a question was auto bumped even after it was changed
  3. Is it possible to find out how many times a certain question has been bumped by Community?
  4. Question re-bumped by community every month
  5. On Stack Overflow Meta
    Why is the Community User so determined to bump this question?
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  • @Rob This question is different from the second question (mine) because that one asks about general limits on Community bumps (i.e. when will and won't questions in general be bumped), while this asks about bump limits for specific questions. Aug 10, 2020 at 22:03

1 Answer 1

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There is no limit; I've never seen staff mention it in formulas, and I'm pretty sure it would make the FAQ if it existed.

According to this SEDE query, there are currently 2 questions which were bumped a whopping 39 times in their history:

However, this is not the complete answer, because the feature existed for longer, and the events are only recorded from 2016 (both in SEDE and in the question's timeline).

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  • Thank you so much for answering! Two more things, your answer suggests that the questions in the sede query are dated from 2016 matching when the timeline feature was added, does that mean any "unanswered" question posted earlier does not appear in the results? Aug 8, 2020 at 8:37
  • Last thing, looking at the unanswered but still opened questions on EL&U, I saw many examples similar to this english.stackexchange.com/questions/251094/… where it appears to have never been bumped. How come? Aug 8, 2020 at 8:39
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    Community doesn't bump questions without an answer (it would make sense if it did, but we have another mechanism to bring those under attention, the Unanswered tab). I assume bumping worked more or less the same before 2016, with the only difference that those events weren't registered. The questions I mentioned are from 2014 resp. 2012.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Aug 8, 2020 at 8:56
  • Would downvoting an answer remove the question from the bump list? Aug 8, 2020 at 9:28
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    Yes, unless there are other answers still scoring 0. Shog9 posted the criteria for bumping here.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Aug 8, 2020 at 9:44
  • Any idea as to why this question attracted 5 downvotes? Does it sound like a feature request? The title is pretty clear to me. Any suggestions as to why are welcomed, thanks. P.S it's for future reference because it's not worth editing the post any further. Aug 13, 2020 at 8:51
  • @Mari-LouA no idea (I upvoted it).
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Aug 13, 2020 at 9:19

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