I want to know if there is a way to vote for closing questions based on inactivity from OP's side. There are more than 9000 unanswered question on https://datascience.stackexchange.com where some of them are more than 3 years old. Is there any way to give a vote like inactive for too long/no activity from OP?
If not, should this be implemented -
If a question is inactive from OP's side for about 3-4 years, then it should be closed.
The worst of these questions have already been deleted by an automatic process:
If the question is more than 365 days old, and ...
- has a score of 0 or less, or a score of 1 and a deleted owner
- has no answers
- is not locked
- has view count <= the age of the question in days times 1.5
- has 1 or 0 comments
- isn't on a meta site
... it will be automatically deleted. These are termed "abandoned" questions (
RemoveAbandonedQuestions).
So there is something that keeps these questions from being deleted: somebody found it useful enough to upvote it, many people end up on the question via a search engine (so it might still be useful to answer it if possible, since many people have a similar problem).
Finally, posts with a negative score will be deleted earlier and with less strict criteria:
If the question is more than 30 days old, and ...
- has −1 or lower score
- has no answers
- is not locked
...
... it will be automatically deleted. These are termed "dead" questions (
RemoveDeadQuestions,
So if you encounter a bad question but it isn't deleted because its score is 0, you can downvote it and be sure the system will get rid of it.
