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Comments on Regular deletion (roomba) of content unlikely to ever be useful

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Regular deletion (roomba) of content unlikely to ever be useful

+9
−0

I noticed that questions exist on this network and are accessible that are unlikely to ever be very helpful, for example because they were marked as completely off-topic.

Examples

The content license does not mean that there is an obligation to keep the content here and removing such content would increase the signal to noise ratio. I don't see much sense in keeping this content. We could therefore permanently remove it from the system.

But there are also questions that have a very low score (typically they are not very high quality with missing information) and often also no answers but aren't closed. With edits and answers they could potentially be converted to something useful, but that may not be very likely. The decision to keep or remove such content might be a bit more difficult.

However, cleaning up more regularly might also increase the appeal of the front pages of the individual sites (see recent discussion).

Should we regularly remove content we deem to be not useful at all?

If yes, what should be the criteria for that (close status, score, number of answers, life time)? Should it be done automatically (automatic cleaning robots) or rather manually (at least for now)? Where should the criteria for that be decided (for each community individually or network-wide)?

Searched for it on Meta but couldn't find anything for "automatic deletion".

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+7
−0

I agree that automatic deletion1) would be a useful way to reduce clutter and manual moderation. I would propose implementing something along the lines of the draft below.

1) Deleted as in "not displayed on the site" - the technical definition on what gets archived and what gets deleted from the actual DB is a discussion for another post.


All posts get automatically deleted after 1 month since the last edit of any question/answer present, if they fulfil any of the following:

  • Closed posts without answers.
  • Closed posts where both the question and all answers have negative score.
  • Questions with a negative score of -3 or more that have no answers, or where all answers also have a negative score of at least -3.

All the details can obviously get fine-tuned and more rules can be added as we come up with them.

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3 comment threads

And until the feature becomes implemented... (11 comments)
Strict -3, or a Wilson score threshold? (4 comments)
What about duplicates? (5 comments)
What about duplicates?
Trilarion‭ wrote almost 3 years ago

Duplicates may have a negative score and no answer but may be kept as search magnets. Maybe add "duplicates are not automatically deleted currently".

Lundin‭ wrote almost 3 years ago

Trilarion‭ I'm not certain which is most important: it's searchability vs site clutter.

Trilarion‭ wrote almost 3 years ago

A more complex solution could be: monitor duplicates for a while and remove those that do not get enough search hits, for example keep only max 2 or 3 of the duplicates with the highest current rate of search hits. And additionally do not display score for duplicate, nor allow voting on duplicates. That way they can just perform the search magnet function.

We could maybe exclude them here for the time being and maybe latter include them if desired.

Lundin‭ wrote almost 3 years ago

Trilarion‭ Or (another complex solution) grab the stuff from the closed dupe, include it in the site info of the dupe target, then delete the dupe. I know too little of search word optimization to tell if this is even feasible though.

Trilarion‭ wrote almost 3 years ago

Nice idea. But at least we should monitor the search hits / visits, which requires support for that by the software.