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Moving along the lines of these questions: Bumping posts for questionable reasons and Feature Request: Question Bumping. What is considered a questionable reason when bumping a post?

For example, I asked a question a week-ish ago and it breezed through the front page with very few views. I went back and edited the question to a "more descriptive" title. I edited the title because my intention was to bump the question back up to the front page. Clearly the edit didn't do much and the question soared through the front page once again. Tumbleweed badge here I come!

I knew when I was licked, but there have been instances where this feature has been abused. What are your thoughts?

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Sometimes it isn't that people aren't interested or aren't reading it... simply, they don't know either. –  Marc Gravell Jul 10 '09 at 23:16

3 Answers 3

up vote 13 down vote accepted

If you want to bump an unanswered question that's fine. That's a feature. Just make sure your edit improves the question in some measurable way. Improve the spelling or grammar. Clarify the question. Tell us where you've looked and what you've found so far. Just getting more people to look at the same question again won't help anyway, unless you make some effort at improvement. Very frequent bumping with no visible change to the question will probably result in it getting flagged and locked.

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agree, with emph: make sure your edit improves the question –  Marc Gravell Jul 10 '09 at 23:15

I think that editing a question to bump it is NOT abuse unless you do it in such a repetitive manner that it starts to really distract from other questions.

If you edit once to get it back up, that's a big difference than bumping it once every half hour.

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o_O the opportunities for abuse in that sentence are just... :) –  GalacticCowboy Jul 10 '09 at 23:00
I thought there was a limit on the number of times it was bumped anyway. Six, or something? Can't remember where I read it, so I might be mistaken. –  Margaret Jul 11 '09 at 0:07
Margaret: AFter 6 edits the question will become community wiki'd (so you get no reputation from it), but you can can on bumping the question theoretically forever.. –  dbr Jul 11 '09 at 2:05

Personally I think bumping a question is so ineffective most of the time that whether or not you "abuse" it is irrelevant.

I say this because it's clear to me the majority of people look at New Questions and not the home page. New questions garner more votes clearly. Also, depending on the day and time, questions can be on the home page for such a short time.

It only really works if the topic engenders response and those new responses keep it alive.

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I agree with that. As someone who monitors the New Questions page, I would never know if something got a bump anyway. –  TheTXI Jul 10 '09 at 23:46

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