Deletion of Zombie Questions [duplicate]

Question

This 12-year-old question was just resurrected by a brand-new user:

fatal error C1034: windows.h: no include path set

The Community system user has a habit of providing attention to un-answered questions by pushing them to the top of the feeds (this is a good thing!); however, the question in...question, can never have an answer selected as correct because the original poster is long gone: their account has been deactivated or deleted (no profile).

Users, particularly new ones, don't tend to notice the age of a question before answering, or that other answers are adequate and just need to provide an upvote instead of a whole new, potentially not useful, answer.

This behavior inevitably could cause an infinite loop of "No selected answer, Community pushes it to the top of the feed, uninformed user adds an answer, [time passes], No selected answer, Community pushes it to the top of the feed, ...continue ad infinitum"

Should there be a system in place to review unanswerable questions like this and potentially delete them? Either add a queue for real users to review them or add logic to Community to purge them after say, 12 months?

Answer 1

Whenever an unanswerable question is reviewed either formally (via a queue), or informally by any user with the downvote privilege, there is an opportunity for its usefulness to be assessed.

From the queue it may be closed, and sometimes deleted, by those with higher reputations but, irrespective of that, each downvote a question receives nudges it towards the Roomba and automated deletion.

I see no need for additional functionality in this regard.