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My first question on SE (vote for me :-).

It may be just me but I get the feeling that the order of the questions in the list of Unanswered questions does not seem to change much. There are 280 pages of 15 questions in the list, what are the chances that any of the old questions will ever see the light of day even though some might be pretty interesting. We need to remember that most visitors look at the first page or two of a list and then move on to other things.

My question is, can the list have perhaps 12 questions from the top of the list that are perhaps RECENT UNANSWERED (with no answers, might have comments and votes) and then 3 random questions that may be older but are listed as RANDOM UNRESOLVED (may have a bad answer or no answer, possible comments and votes even but possibly not fresh) with both groups clearly labelled.

This way the list may slowly get shorter as people see a random question that they know the answer to and put it to bed. Having a list of 4000+ questions is a bit silly and having resolved questions is better for SE than flaunting 4000 poor questions/answers.

This would also paste over the semantic error in the Unanswered vs Unresolved listing name.

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    \$\begingroup\$ We get plenty of new questions here, so I don't see the point in dredging up old losers. Sometimes they are "unanswered" because it was a drive-by question and the OP never came back to accept a answer. \$\endgroup\$
    – Olin Lathrop
    Commented Sep 3, 2014 at 12:49

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This isn't a direct answer, but there is already a mechanism to occasionally bump a unaswered question. It then goes onto the main list. I don't know what effect it has on the unanswered list since I never look there anyway.

Look at questions on the front page, and occasionally you will see the last activity by "community". That's the name used when the automatic process bumps a old question. In other words, we're already doing what you want, sortof.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ The Un-answered list should then rightly be called the archive list. The bump will only occur if someone has seen one of the archived posts by paging into the 4000 long list or searching when in need only to find it was long forgotten and never resolved though perhaps easy to do in advance with current members. Displaying a random one from the pool would also bring them to he attention of current members who could delete or vote on them occasionally to get them put in the correct places. \$\endgroup\$
    – KalleMP
    Commented Sep 3, 2014 at 7:40
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Kall: Technically it's the "un-answered" list, but you can think of it as the loser list, or the dregs from a bygone era. \$\endgroup\$
    – Olin Lathrop
    Commented Sep 3, 2014 at 12:50

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