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.][2] 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.][3] 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] 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.][5] 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.][6] [1]: http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/193798/130540 [2]: http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/5221/130540 [3]: http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006/130540 [4]: http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/22228/130540 [5]: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/193798/are-questions-closed-as-duplicates-ever-automatically-deleted [6]: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/32311/do-not-delete-good-duplicates