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Today I noticed this on a post:

Bumped to homepage by Community post screenshot

What exactly does this mean and what triggered it?

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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The community user will randomly bump old questions to the front page in order to attract more attention. It will only bump questions that meet certain criteria:

  • A question score >= 0
  • Gone at least 30 days with no activity
  • Has at least one non-deleted answer with score = 0
  • Has no answer with score > 0
  • Has no accepted answer
  • Is not deleted or closed

This action will take place once an hour. If no questions are found matching these critiera, the bot does nothing.

Recently, a change was added to make the bump more obvious. This is the banner you saw in the post (also known as an annotation), as well as a note added to the Timeline and revision history.

Timeline View: Timeline View

Revisions View: Revisions View

Rest assured that while Community is a bot, it will not rise up to become Skynet (yet, though the SE devs have said otherwise). It's just a helpful little bot to give old questions a chance to see the light of day again and be dealt with accordingly.

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  • Ah, I see, well, it bumped it, so I closed it. >:P
    – user364819
    Commented May 11, 2017 at 18:01
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    That's fine. In fact, that's one of the purposes of the bot -- bump old questions so that we can see them and decide what the best course of action is (answering, upvoting an existing answer, closing it, whatever).
    – Kaz Wolfe
    Commented May 11, 2017 at 18:02
  • FWIW as a non-admin it's really annoying to have old questions pop to the top of the question queue when there's no user action. I'm seeing lots of questions on 12.04, wondering why people are still using it -- but if course they're not, and so answering such questions is a massive misdirection of resources. IMO you should bump questions on current versions; only bump older questions if user input indicates it would be useful (eg question upvote).
    – pbhj
    Commented Jun 14, 2018 at 12:34

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