How can we stay on top of old questions? / Guidelines for old questions

Question

Last night (Around this time) I went through the Unanswered Questions from the bottom up. I got through till page 3 only choosing questions that the user who asked had shown recent activity or more reputation than the inactive-asker. I realized that this should definitely be something that we should regularly pay attention to.

Pro Webmasters is one of the lowest answer-rate sites on SE. I think with just some paying attention and follow-up comments to make sure the question was answered, we can increase our answer-rate as well as encourage users to come to Pro Webmasters for their questions.

Although it doesn't take long to go through the questions of old and add a comment, we should establish some guidelines about:

• What reputation required for a follow-up comment
• How long ago dubs it 'Old'
• What should be discarded
• How to respond

I have gotten 3 responses so far, 2 of them the user found the answer already and posted it, and the third I put a bounty on. This shouldn't be a responsibility for only the Moderators. We all can chip in and make Pro Webmasters just that much better.

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EDIT

I want to expand this question to include a discussion on Guidelines for old questions that need to be deleted and / or when to give a 'poke' (Add a comment) to the user letting them know that their question does not have an answer chosen. Here is a few ideas on the criteria for both.

Before I continue, allow me to clarify this 'poke.' Adding a comment to the question asking the user whether or not a method worked that was presented or if they have found a solution that wasn't originally presented. Or, if you have a solution that didn't occur to you when the question was presented

Questions to be deleted criteria:

• Closed questions 'linger' for 3 days, then are deleted. These include questions that have been migrated to another site.

• Questions can be 'protected' to halt the deletion process and allow that question to stay.

  Just in case there is a question that for some reason we would like to stay in Pro Webmasters. Perhaps to prevent further duplicates.

Questions to be revisited criteria:

• User asking the question must have above 100 reputation.

  This might seem odd to some, however I felt it necessary as giving a comment to notify the user that his/her question is still unanswered is useless if they never come back. Having a reputation of above 100 (Especially for the really old questions) is a good indicator that the particular user visits Pro Webmasters or anyother Stack Exchange website decently often.

• Question must be 5 days old.

  This is there because before 5 days, the question can typically still be viewed at the top of the second page of questions, in which can still receive above negligible views.

• Poorly worded questions should be avoided or commented for clarification.

  In order to have well-formed questions that people can search for.

I'm looking for suggestions or to get a good discussion going about some guidelines. The ones I have posted are just suggestions themselves and can change. I want to get this question up to the SE team for some tweaks to the site.

Answer 1

Excellent! You might also be interested in

https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/review

which will highlight posts by new users, primarily.

In general, I suggest answering any questions, even old ones, that you feel are interesting and can be interesting to others. There is value in answering questions that have nad no recent activity -- this bumps the question naturally, and if I see a good answer, I will always upvote it, regardless of how old the question is.

However, this assumes the original question is interesting enough for me to click on in some way -- if it's a really bad question (title, etc) or an extremely obscure topic. However, this can often be fixed with editing.

Thus, now that we have anonymous and low-rep edit suggestions, I would "punch up" the question as well when answering, to maximize the chances of people seeing both the question and your (excellent, of course) answer.

Answer 2

What about questions which are bumped up from Community which were asked by a member who's no longer a user on SE. An example is this question which was just bumped up Apache http.conf allow intranet

It was asked in 2011 and the user doesn't have a profile. Since no answer can be selected if it stays it'll be left up to the community to up vote the best answers.