Post History

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

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
- [Are international phone numbers available?](https://powerusers.codidact.com/posts/284858) in Power User
- [For cleaning food and objects, power scrubber vs. Electric rotary toothbrush?](https://physics.codidact.com/posts/280987) in Physics
- [What is the worst code you ever saw?](https://software.codidact.com/posts/278219) in Software Development

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](https://meta.codidact.com/posts/285126)).

**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)?

<sup>Searched for it on Meta but couldn't find anything for "automatic deletion".</sup>

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

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
- [Are international phone numbers available?](https://powerusers.codidact.com/posts/284858) in Power User
- [For cleaning food and objects, power scrubber vs. Electric rotary toothbrush?](https://physics.codidact.com/posts/280987) in Physics
- [What is the worst code you ever saw?](https://software.codidact.com/posts/278219) in Software Development

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](https://meta.codidact.com/posts/285126)).

**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)?

<sup>Searched for it on Meta but couldn't find anything for "automatic deletion".</sup>