The fastest way to get rid of bad questions is to close them and make sure they have a downvote.

[In this previous post,][1] I suggested searching for:

> closed:yes migrated:no 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:yes migrated:no answers:0 score:-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.


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

> closed:yes migrated:no 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.


  [1]: http://meta.serverfault.com/a/5647/6177