How to find and clean up bad questions

Question

We've got lots of existing meta posts about how many bad questions there are and how much of a problem they are (or aren't) - that's not what this question is about.

I wanted to collect in one post some techniques for finding bad questions and dealing with them and it should come as no surprise that by "dealing with them" I mean to downvote the bad ones.

The automatic delete rules are our friend here: questions with no answers and negative scores (or 0, or even +1 in some situations) will be automatically deleted if they meet certain criteria. I'll be posting some of the searches I do to find bad questions and anyone else who has ideas can do the same.

Here are the automatic deletion rules:

9 Days

If a question was closed more than 9 days ago, and ...

• was not closed as a duplicate
• has a score of 0 or less
• is not locked
• has no answers with a score > 0
• has no accepted answer
• has no pending reopen votes
• has not been edited in the past 9 days

... it will be automatically deleted. This check is run every day. (at 0300 UTC)

30 Days

If a question (open or closed) is more than 30 days old, and ...

• has −1 or lower score
• has no answers*
• is not locked

...or if it was closed and migrated to a different site...

... it will be automatically deleted. This check is run every week. (0300 UTC on Saturday, to be precise.)

*NOTE: In most SE contexts, "no answers" means "no answers with a score > 0" i.e. no upvoted answers. But there are comments on Reference #2 that imply this auto-delete scenario only applies to question with no answers whatsoever.

1 Year

If a question (open or closed) is more than 365 days old, and ...

• has a score of 0 or a score of 1 with a deleted owner
• has no answers
• is not locked
• has a viewcount <= the age of the question in days times 1.5
• has 1 or 0 comments

... it will be automatically deleted. This check is also run once a week.

References:

1. The official FAQ post on meta.SE about how deleting works. The first answers includes the rules for automatic deletion, and links to more detailed explanations given in the next reference.

2. The post on meta.SE that most clearly states when "bad" posts are automatically deleted. This includes a new rule for automatic deletion that was added in June 2013.

3. Since the automatic delete rules mention locked questions, here's the official FAQ post on those.

4. Duplicates

My post on meta.SE asking if the auto-delete rules apply to questions closed as duplicates is the closest thing there is to an official answer. And the answer is: Duplicates do vanish, so the auto-delete rules apparently apply.

This isn't official since there's nothing posted by SE employees, but it explains what the observed behaviour is: the same autodelete rules apply to questions closed as duplicates. There's a link to Shog9's answer to another question that implies that crappy duplicates deserve to be deleted.

Answer 1

The fastest way to get rid of bad questions is to close them and make sure they have a downvote. Here are some ideas for searching for bad questions...

#1 - Closed questions with no answers and no upvotes

In this previous post, I suggested searching for:

closed:1 migrated:0 answers:0 score:0

(Note that score:0 matches only posts with score=0, whereas score:anything_else matches score>=anything_else)

On 3 August 2013, there were ~1300 results from this search, but apparently multiple people got in on the cleanup and there are now (18 Aug) only 77 results, most of them merged duplicates which will never be deleted (merged questions are another type of "locked," so they'll always fail that test.)

And if you look at the results of:

closed:1 migrated:0 answers:0 score:-1...-1

(If you just use score:-1, you get all the questions with score >= -1. The syntax shown limits it to only -1)

You'll see that once you go 30 days back, there are very, very few -1 questions left. Yay! All sorts of bad questions gone.

#2 - Closed questions with no answers and one upvote

This next one isn't as dramatic, search for closed but upvoted questions:

closed:1 migrated:0 answers:0 score:1

Since score:1 means score>=1 this matches a few questions with multiple upvotes, but most of them are only +1.  (As of 19 Aug 2013, this search gives ~370 results, and ~300 of them are at +1.)

The questions that this search turns up that are +1 are a mixed bag - when I go through the list, I see some that are ok, but many others I think are bad. If they get downvoted to 0 and they're a year old, they'll get auto-deleted. If they get downvoted to -1, they'll get deleted once they're a month old.

#3 - Questions (open or closed) with no answers and no upvotes

(This is newly added in Sep 2014... I'm not sure how I missed it when I first posted.)

answers:0 score:0 locked:0

There are tons of these and many of them are crappy. If so, give them a downvote so they're at -1 and they'll get taken care of on the next Saturday cleanup. I usually sort the search results by date and look through the oldest ones first. I find it's easier to spot old crappy questions.

When I added this idea on 9 Sep 2014, this search gave ~8800 results, now on 12 Sep it's down to 8400, so yay!

Today, I thought of a complementary search:

answers:0 score:1 locked:0

Lots of the questions with just 1 vote are also crappy, so if one person votes those down to 0, they'll show up when someone else does the earlier search for votes:0

Answer 2

Inspired by @Iain, I'm cutting back on close vote reviewing for a while to try to close some questions. Here are a couple ideas for searching specifically for stuff that deserves* closing:

answers:0 votes:-22...-2 closed:0

This returns open questions with no answers and multiple downvotes, lots of them are crappy and deserve closing.

answers:0 votes:-1...-1 closed:0

This only returns open questions with no answers and exactly one (net) downvote. Some of these are bad enough to be worth closing, others are borderline. If you go back to the oldest ones, most of them aren't going to get any attention, so it's probably worth closing the borderline ones. (and letting the auto-delete faeries get them)

*Deserves: use your own judgement, this isn't a call for pile-on closing, just to prune the ones that are clearly crap.