Stop bumping old imported posts with no-change edits
Lately some old posts that were already old when imported from elsewhere have popped to the top of the active questions list. In one case, one of the answers was apparently deleted.
Two recent ones show activity on the main question. When examining the edit history, it shows the whole question changed, but without any actual changes. Here is an example screen shot looking at the edit history of the main question:
The text looks the same, and the tags are the same. Nothing seems to have actually changed.
Let's please stop doing that. Artificially bumping questions is bad enough, but dredging up old imported questions is ever worse.
Maybe it's time to consider deleting all the old imported questions.
One of the major selling points of Codidact when considering moving here is that we didn't have to start from scratch and leave behind all of the content that we had put so much work into.
And now that we have some experience with new sites, this is broadly recognized as having been a mistake.
All those attribution links give the impression this site is just a copy at best, and invites people to go to the original source.
If these old imported damaging posts keep getting brought to the front, then we really should just delete them all.
Two more such posts showed up today. Once again, the question itself shows a recent edit time, but no change is apparent when looking at the edit history.
What is going on here?
2 answers
You are accessing this answer with a direct link, so it's being shown above all other answers regardless of its score. You can return to the normal view.
No.
The point of this site is to build a resource for future visitors, not to generate interesting questions for people to answer.
One of the major selling points of Codidact when considering moving here is that we didn't have to start from scratch and leave behind all of the content that we had put so much work into.
I don't want to reanswer questions that I have already answered on the old site, like this one for example. nor do I want to have to link to SE every time I need to reference an old answer or question.
It would be reasonable to ask that the front page not get flooded, but it has long been established that bumping one or two old questions per day is fine, especially in times of little other activity.
In one case, one of the answers was apparently deleted.
I disagree that this would as a rule be undesirable. Cleaning up imported content seems perfectly valid to me; I don't see how anybody is served by keeping bad content around, for any definition of "bad content".
Now, one can certainly argue whether an answer deletion should bump the question, and I can see good arguments both ways. But that's not what your question seems to be about.
Maybe it's time to consider deleting all the old imported questions.
Possibly, or possibly not; either way, for visibility, I think that such a discussion should be held in a Meta post that is clearly and specifically about that.
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