What should we do about old and/or off-topic questions that get bumped?

Question

This question just came to the top of the front page: When do non TEM waves occur?

This is a purely physics-based question. At this minute, the SE 1.0 site is gone and the area51 beta is not up yet. However, the SE 1.0 site was up when the question was asked.

There are three things that I would like to feel out with the community in dealing with bumped questions:

1. How strict should we be about the topics we allow to appear on the site?
2. Old questions will get bumped to the front page, and see more activity on occasion. Is this desirable?
3. What cleanup should be done on old Chiphacker questions which are off-topic?

Note: For #2, we might need to draw a distinction between people (like archgoon, in this case) who contribute value to the question, and those who earn edit/retag privileges and start bumping lots of questions.

Answer 1

I would have to say that EM theory is as much electronics as DSP.

When it comes down to it EM theory determines a lot of what we do with PCB layouts and such. I would not agree that this question should be removed.

Ignoring the question you linked and discussing your question.

1. I was attempting to be very clear on this at first, and as I posted about it for feedback I found out that it is very hard to define clear lines of what questions go on here. I think we need to try to get some sort of clear set of subjects, but we may just have to accept some boundary questions will show up
2. I think if an old question has not been answered we should allow others to back and answer it. Our goal should be a site full of questions and answers, old questions without good answer have no value.
3. If an off-topic question gets bumped, lets boot it. We should discuss it a bit on meta if we are not clear on if it meets our defined boundaries. I would be fine deciding TE and TM modes of EM propagation does not fit our site if everyone thinks it may degrade our site's content and fit on a different site more.

Answer 2

A lot of pure physics is relevant in EE. EM questions are key to microwave component design, whether practice or theory. Asking questions about non-TEM is okay; I can imagine it having relevance to understanding antennas, waveguides, optoelectronics, or something. OTOH, asking about, say, second quantization of bosonic guage particle fields = too crazy deep theoretical physics for this SE site. But somewhere between those examples, there's probably a broad fuzzy zone, fuzzier in the future as new types of sensors and components come into use. I think of MMIC design...

Answer 3

Off-topic, yeah, remove/ignore/whatever it.

On-topic but old, perfectly fine. Please don't be like BB forum mods who think extending a month's old thread with reasonable questions is VERBOTEN and immediately close the thread and yell at the (likely new) user.