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The algorithm run by "Community" to elevate certain questions to the top of the list seems seriously flawed IMHO. The description of its tasks includes:

"Randomly poke old unanswered questions every hour so they get some attention"

But I've seen it do this for questions that do have some kind of answer.

More annoyingly, I've seen the same marginal questions with marginal answers get recycled to the top of the list over and over. The questions/answers are not so bad that they should simply be deleted. But all participants of this group shouldn't be subjected to them again and again either.

Is there some way we can flag these questions to prevent this action by Community?

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  • $\begingroup$ Bill Greene, I added the status-completed tag, even though it was implemented in a slightly different form. I am open to change it to status-declined if you feel it is of any importance. $\endgroup$
    – Anton Menshov Mod
    Nov 17, 2019 at 18:04

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The description on the profile page is misleading -- what actually happens is that the community bot randomly bumps one question per hour from the list of those

scoring >= 0 that have gone at least 30 days with no activity, have at least one non-deleted answer scoring 0 and none scoring more than that, and no accepted answer (also, they can't be locked or closed).

The rationale is to give new answers to old questions more chances to get seen (they can vanish very quickly from the front page or the review queue on the really large sites like StackOverflow).

So if you want to prevent a question from being bumped again, upvote an answer (or downvote all answers if they are not useful -- or, even better, add your own answer that is good enough to get upvoted).

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  • $\begingroup$ I generally won't down-vote a question or answer unless it has at least one significant flaw. Similarly, I generally won't upvote answers that are rather mediocre. It seems like a reasonable compromise would be to have Community poke a question only one time. That would give it two chances to get attention from list-browsers. Obviously, if someone is searching for an answer, they might find that question no matter what position in the list. $\endgroup$
    – Bill Greene
    Mar 4, 2017 at 13:16
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    $\begingroup$ I share your policy on voting; nevertheless, I think it's the only option we have. The behavior of the bot is system-wide and shaped by the needs of the "big sites", so I don't think we'll get any changes based on our particular preferences. $\endgroup$
    – Christian Clason
    Mar 4, 2017 at 13:59
  • $\begingroup$ Actually, the frequency of the bumping of questions in general does already seem to be configurable per site, so turning this way down (say, to once per day instead of per hour, which is the current default) might be a compromise. $\endgroup$
    – Christian Clason
    Mar 4, 2017 at 14:02
  • $\begingroup$ Never mind, I misread: The frequency is fixed, it's the number of questions per bump that's configurable. One (or zero) might be a lower limit. In that case it's either turn off bumping altogether or accepting the status quo. $\endgroup$
    – Christian Clason
    Mar 4, 2017 at 14:08
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There has been a change in January 2019 that

the community user can't rebump a question unless the original bump is more than X days in the past.

Currently (as of Feb 2019), this value X is 120 days. So, no question should be bumped more than once every 120 days (unless some activity happens).

I would say it is an implementation of your suggestion @BillGreene, with a caveat of bumping ban to have an expiration time.

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