Why do edits to old questions bump them to the top? / Should there be a time limit for this?

Question

This is quite possibly re-iterating something that's been said before, but it is confusing me slightly.

The home page for me at the moment is currently a stream of edited posts (at my last count, 35 out of ~50), most of them originally >2 years old, a few already answered, and some of them addressing EOL versions of Ubuntu. To me, it seems that these don't really have much place being bumped back to the front page.

I understand the value of archived questions being updated in some way if there are problems with the content - better legibility is always a good thing - but is it really necessary (or indeed, useful) to have them brought front and centre on the site, to the point where they are burying actual recent questions?

Answer 1

Ultimately, I agree. There is a lot of editing that is still worthwhile but that doesn't actually change anything about the question. The front page can quickly become bombed by old questions when somebody runs around nuking a tag, for example.

A time limit is a bit crude and it means picking a date where we've given up. I'd be more for quality-based analysis of edits (scoring the edit automatically to see how significant it is) but if nothing else, a two-year cut-off wouldn't be an appalling things.

But ultimately, this isn't something we can control, like most of the site behaviour, it's just the way SE is. If this is something that bothers you, abandon / to the peasants and join the /questions/ club (which by default will show you the newest things without extraneous bumpage).

Answer 2

The time limit exists for one simple purpose: Checks.

Every edit has the potential to introduce spam and offensive content. Posts are bumped up to bring this to the eyes of all other users, so they can take action if necessary.

Answer 3

There must be ways to bump questions, imho. Some of my questions have accepted answers posted over a month after. The simplest way to do is to edit the question with an update.

You could try to set some sort of rule, like questions over 1 year old with an accepted answer not bumping up any more.

Answer 4

I agree with this. There should be a way to update a question and get it bumped up. Sometimes my updates have been posted after I tried the first answer, or I went back to the problem and had found something new about it.

Maybe a way to flag an edit as one that shouldn't be bumped. If I know my edit was stupid, or grammatical fixes, I can flag it so that it is not bumped up.