Why so many old questions at the top of the list -- and what to do with them?

Question

I can understand that it's good to let low-scoring older questions bubble back to the surface, in case there is new information, or someone has a new angle: but there often seem to be a lot of very old questions on the front page of the site.

Often these just have "modified 16 mins Community", but I can never find what that edit might be. Is that just spam removal?

Do old questions ever get 'archived'? (At what point do questions about OS X Panther become Retrocomputing?)

Do 'low-quality' questions-and-answers (e.g. someone never responds to a Q, and low scores all round) ever get pruned from the site?

I often start typing an answer and then realise it's about someone's hard drive 7 years ago. Yes, I suppose I could click on "Questions" instead.

And I can understand that some little nugget of info might be the very info needed by someone searching for answers.

I suppose I'm just thinking out loud that the 'signal-to-noise' is sometimes high. (Or is that low?)

Can we vote to close questions on grounds of being old and unimpressive?

Answer 1

Bumps

The Community user bumps old questions to the front page occasionally. You can tell a question has been bumped because it will show in the

• revision history (/posts/id/revisions)

  

• timeline (/posts/id/timeline)

  

• The Community user will bump non-negatively scored, open questions every hour that have at least one answer scoring 0 and none scoring more than that.
  • Questions are picked randomly from the top-viewed questions with last activity more than 30 days ago.
  • Once a question is bumped, it will be ineligible for bumping for the next 120 days, unless it receives new activity after the last bump. (Bumping a question counts as new activity, so at a given time, questions bumped within the last 30 days are guaranteed not to be bumped.)
  • The maximum number of unanswered questions bumped per hour [is] 1 per hour [on] all other sites.

What can cause a question to be bumped?

Deletions

Old questions don't get archived as they can still be valuable for people using older systems. The Community user does delete questions falling under a certain criteria, which you can see at /help/roomba.