Why does “Community” regularly bring very old topics back up to the top

Question

Every day I see many posts/questions at the top of the "forum" where Community has modified a question or comment. It will say something like "modified 9h ago Community". When you click on that link it just brings you to the string with no indication of what was done, or that anything was done at all.

I know this site is not a message board, but it has an almost identical format. Typically dragging up really old threads is considered poor etiquette as many times someone new will reply as if the questions were made recently, all while the original poster is long gone.

I have read some other topics where they say it is good to give new life to old threads where someone might ask a similar question, but typically it is an old topic where someone asks a question specific to their situation and it has already been sufficiently been answered.

Not trying to be too critical of the site, just asking out of curiosity.

Answer 1

Community bumps questions that are "unanswered". The bumping is done to give more exposure to questions that require an answer. They may have been asked during a period when not many people were active on the site, or simply got lost in the flow of new questions.

Stack Exchange calls any question that doesn't have an upvoted answer "unanswered". So you'll find questions that do have answers being bumped as well as ones that are completed unanswered.

The correct actions here are:

1. Vote on the answers. Upvote the good/correct ones, downvote the bad/incorrect ones.
2. Provide your own answer (if you know the answer of course).

Source

Answer 2

This usually happens when the question has no upvoted answers. It's done deliberately to bring new attention to the question so that:

• if someone who didn't see it first time around but that can answer it better than any existing answer, they have the chance to do so.
• if someone who didn't see it first time around feels that an existing answer deserves a vote, they can do so.

As you've noticed, we do have some drive-by questions that can't be answered because they lack enough information. If you see those getting bumped to the top, please flag or vote for closure as "unclear what you're asking", " too broad", or (once you have 3000 rep) with a custom close reason. Once closed, they won't get bumped again.