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The Community user seems (at least as far as I can tell) to pick questions that have no accepted answer to bump to the top of the home page. This includes questions with no answers, one answer and sometimes several answers.

Now while it might be a good idea for these questions to be revisited in the hope of getting a better answer, surely it would be better to concentrate on those questions with no answers at all.

Here's an example from Super User of where the question does have answers.

So - can the algorithm be changed to favour questions with no answers at all?

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I think it does favor them, but I can't know for sure –  jmfsg Mar 11 '10 at 12:34
I think the continued issue of an abandoned, or potentially abandoned, question (if these questions really had a bunch of bogus answers, and not a real one, there's no issue--abandoned questions give it more weight) points to a real need to handle them. Doesn't seem like they're interested in doing that, but I just want to point out that this is another instance of 'only a problem because we don't handle abandoned questions'. –  D_N Mar 12 '10 at 3:59

3 Answers 3

up vote 4 down vote accepted

As mentioned by Jeff, it uses the 0-upvoted answers definition. The community user will not bump a question if there are any answers with a score > 0. As for why this is preferred, let's look at it from both sides:

At least one answer, total score is 0 or less

Let's pretend for a moment that the question does not have any good answers. In that case, isn't this question just as deserving of extra attention as one with no answers at all? On the other hand, say it does have a good answer. In that case, it only takes one upvote to that answer for it to disappear from the unanswered view and never get bumped again. We want to make sure the unanswered view is well maintained, and so the chance to upvote this answer is just as valuable to the community as bumping a question with on good answers.

No Answers

Your argument here is that these questions are somehow more deserving of the extra attention. I put it to you that there is often a very good reason these questions are not answered. Often, the only purpose of bumping these questions is so we can spot them and vote to close them. In other words, they are just as often less deserving of your time, not more. I will grant you that a filter on the score for the question might fix this, so that it only bumps questions with a score >= 0. Then it would also provide the community a chance to downvote or close these bad questions in the same way it gives us a chance to upvote deservings answers to clean the unanswered view.

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See the definition of answered, here:


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OK - the Community user is using the "unanswered" definition. I understand and accept this for the "unanswered" tab, but I still think questions with zero answers should get "bumping" priority as only a few get bumped each day. –  ChrisF Mar 11 '10 at 12:59

This sounds like the discussion: Should unanswered questions be considered all questions with no accepted answer or only questions with no answer. And I guess the same algorithm is used to figure out which questions Community user should pick.

Therefore I vote for No!

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