Abandoned, unanswered questions can be a nuisance for readers when they appear in search results. While every question deserves a chance to be answered, at some point the annoyance to those searching for a solution outweighs the increasingly small chance that an answer will be provided. For this reason, [the Community user][1] will automatically delete old abandoned / dead questions in the following circumstances: **If the question is more than 30 days old, and ...** - has −1 or lower score - has no answers - is not locked - has not been migrated from another site **...or...** - it was closed and migrated to a different site (i.e. it is a migration stub) **...or...** - it was migrated *from* a different site, and then [rejected](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10249/what-is-migration-and-how-does-it-work) ... it will be automatically deleted. Internally, these are termed "dead" questions (`RemoveDeadQuestions`, `RemoveMigrationStubs` in the case of a migration stub, or `RemoveRejectedMigrations` in the case of a rejected migration). For this criterion only, when calculating the question's score, only downvotes that were cast [more than two days ago](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/269392/lost-5-questions-following-a-serial-downvote?noredirect=1&lq=1) are considered. This is to prevent serial downvotes from causing automatic deletions and allow the voting fraud scripts to run before the checks above run. **If the question is more than 365 days old, and ...** - has a score of 0 or less, **or** a score of 1 or less in case the owner's account is deleted - 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 ... it will be automatically deleted. These are "abandoned" questions (`RemoveAbandonedQuestions`). These checks are run every week across all sites. **If the question was closed more than 9 days ago, and ...** - not closed as a duplicate - has a score of 0 or less - is not locked - has no answers with a score > 0 - has no accepted answer - has no pending reopen votes - has not been edited in the past `9` days - has not been migrated from another site ... it will be automatically deleted. These are "abandoned closed", and show as `RemoveAbandonedClosed`. This check is run every day across all sites. --- The particular script which applied to a given question is shown in the timeline entry for its deletion, in the "comment" column: [![Example of a question deleted under RemoveDeadQuestions][2]][2] See also: The official ["How does deleting work? What can cause a post to be deleted, and what does that actually mean?"][3] FAQ meta post. [1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19738/who-is-the-community-user [2]: https://i.sstatic.net/X4igU.png [3]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5221/how-does-deleting-work-what-can-cause-a-post-to-be-deleted-and-what-does-that