Community user is popping up old questions

Archived Forums Questions & Answers
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The Community user is popping up very old questions which are already answered. These are all questions that have not been accepted by users in the past. This gives a blurry view of which questions are still left to answer and which not. I know that this is a user's problem, because they didn't take responsibility to actually accept answers, but the main page is now crowded with old irrelevant questions.

Couldn't we do something about this? Options could be: flagging old posts, telling every user to go accept their answer or just: let Community stop doing this pushing of old questions.

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Unfortunately there is very little we can do about it. Personally I believe the best solution would be to let moderators and people > 10,000 rep accept answers for unanswered, idle questions 5 days or so after the question was posted.

But, that will never happen. Unity Answer's version of Stack Exchange doesn't support that functionality and it won't unless the site is upgraded to a newer version which doesn't seem to likely.

If we want to solve the problem, we need to change the culture at Unity Answers. We have new people joining everyday. People who read the faq understand what's going on, but it is easy for someone to jump on, create an account ask a question and never come back again. This leads to what you are describing where their are questions asked that get multiple answers, but the OP doesn't respond.

Now of course, this is NOT the only reason questions go unanswered. There are plenty of times where there was no good answer to a question and the question fizzled out. And sometimes these get answered when the bot stirs them and that is a good thing. I would say that if 1 question out of 10 that was stirred actually finds an answer, I believe that the bot is doing its job. Now, it is annoying to say the least to click on a question then see 2-3 extended answers and none of them have been accepted, but it is more important at least to me that the one person with a real unanswered question gets their's solved.

Unfortunately, in the current system, the only thing the community can do to end an unanswered question is to have high level members close the question and that will stop the bot from stirring it again. Besides the fact this is hard to do simple because its hard to find 5 people with >3000 rep who all look at the same question stirred by the bot (Personally I don't even look at questions stirred by the community bot), that still leaves the question unanswered and someone didn't get the rep for answering their question, but to say the least, the question won't keep popping up again.

This is why it is so important to remind OP's to accept an answer. For building a better future answers, I believe the most important thing that users can do is remind question askers to accept an answer with just a comment. Some people just forget about there question, or don't even know how to accept an answer so a friendly reminder will possibly lead to an accepted answer and teach the person how things operate on the answers.

I made this question a wiki, so go head and change it. Its all an opinion so you can go head and up-vote down-vote based on how much you agree. Don't worry, you won't hurt my feelings :).

Yeah, the only easy solution is to get the OPs to accept answers, where applicable. The problem is also that a lot of people just create an account, ask a question and forget all about it. Maybe they read the answer and got in a rush to fix their code and never came back.

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Good answer, but couldn't the bot, just like the unanswered tab look at questions that don't have any upvoted answers? If there are upvoted answers to a question, there is a big chance of having a good answer already. And if not, the user should Update its question with new information.

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It's one of those things, yes it could do it, but it doesn't. You have to remember that Unity Answers was built on an old version of Stack Exchange from the beginning and it doesn't support that functionality.

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@Peter, alright I'll stop complaining about it =). I just thought it was possible, because the unanswered tab supports the same functionality.

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I've been "tricked" into these questions as well (I can't help but feel like "Aaw, shoot, Community Bot pwnt me again!"). Funny thing is I have answered dead old questions and even got a reply back from the OP at times, so it's not completely uselss.

However, I'd love to opt a different coloring scheme or the ability to block "Community popups" if you really aren't interested in the old topics. I would for sure go with a different coloring to easier realize it was recently brought up by the Community Bot.

A horrible idea I have is that we could add an **old-question tag to those answers and add that tag to your ignore tags or *interesting tags, to opt out or highlight them. However, it would be a crazy horrible job to re-tag them all, so I doubt it's a good idea. What are your thoughts?

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