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I noticed this question had been bumped recently, and when looking at the edit history it appears that a single user edits the title repeatedly. Presumably in an effort to gain exposure for their answer. I noticed similar behavior here. Is this appropriate, and should it be reported in any way?

I would think good questions and answers should receive traffic based on their appeal and how often they show up in search results, not the traffic generated by being on the front page(?).

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  • Related (mostly of historical interest - 2014): Stop using community wiki as a reputation denial mechanism (my emphasis) - "we have removed all of the automatic triggers that convert a post to community wiki. Edits by the original author, edits by other people, and even volume of answers, all of these no longer cause a post to be automatically converted to community wiki. There will instead be flags for moderator action cast in these situations ... That will help take care of the actual abuse scenarios"
    – This_is_NOT_a_forum
    Apr 28, 2022 at 22:44

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This is absolutely inappropriate; the edits don't improve anything which is further reflected by the fact that the user rolls them back repeatedly. This is a blatant abuse of privileges and you should flag the post for moderator attention. A related discussion can be found here: Any consideration to preventing tactical edits, which can be used to generate artificial Question exposure?. Can I get suspended for bumping my post? doesn't really answer your question; that is about a question author bumping their own post.

Fortunately, this type of behaviour is relatively easy to spot via the Stack Exchange Data Explorer. We can query for the number of edits to question by an author of one of its answers, and then inspect the revisions manually to decide whether they're really worthwhile or just intended to bump the question. This query does so, and the case you found is indeed in the top 20 results. I've just used it to flag two obvious cases of sockpuppetry.

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    I have flagged the questions, they're currently pending. You are correct that the proposed duplicate wasn't really a synonym for my question. The answers though did seem like they would apply. May have been my mistake to accept it.
    – Derrick Moeller
    Apr 28, 2022 at 20:01
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    No problem. Technically, we can close half of the questions here as duplicate of a question whose answer says "use common sense" ... but that doesn't mean we can be more specific when it's needed. I'm glad I spent a couple of minutes practicing my SQL skills; I'm not trying to set up a witch hunt, and there's a thing like 'statute of limitations', but it's a good thing that things like this can be audited.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Apr 28, 2022 at 20:06
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    @DerrickMoeller This has been handled. Feel free to re-flag if you notice this behavior continuing.
    – Zoe is on strike
    Apr 28, 2022 at 20:18
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    @Glorfindel I think you wrote an excellent query, but by limiting it to posts active in the last year it can be a lot more useful, seeing that there are plenty of cases in here from 2013, 2016 etc. that are now pointless to act upon.
    – Luuklag
    Apr 29, 2022 at 10:24
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    @Luuklag thanks, it took a while to fix that (some types of queries need 'special care' for running on SO) but I've managed to add a flexible 'Last edit date' which you can change yourself.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Apr 30, 2022 at 17:59
  • Is there a query for a list of users who edit their own answers/questions? I'm interested in seeing any patterns between users who keep editing continuously. Thanks
    – Mari-Lou A Слава Україні
    Apr 30, 2022 at 20:05
  • @Mari-LouAСлаваУкраїні I don't know, SEDE has a search function but it rarely gives me the results I want (I guess I'm not patient enough). The system automatically raises a moderator flags in case of excessive edits by a post owner, so those cases don't go undetected.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    May 1, 2022 at 6:33
  • I remember one user who edited their answer something like 40 times. This was a couple of years ago, but it always struck me strange that nobody said anything. I tried fixing all the mistakes in one take hoping that would halt the edits but instead the guy continued editing. It ended up being a very very long answer.
    – Mari-Lou A Слава Україні
    May 1, 2022 at 8:32
  • @Mari-LouAСлаваУкраїні it turns out I recently wrote a query like that: data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1533597/…
    – Glorfindel Mod
    May 1, 2022 at 16:21

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