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. **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.) **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. **Duplicates** I am [awaiting clarification on what happens with questions closed as being duplicates.][1] From what I've seen, duplicates are treated exactly the same as any other question under the 30- and 365-day rules: they're gone. But OTOH, I've seen comments (including from SF mods) that duplicates don't get deleted, and I've seen lots of comments on meta.SO that they don't and/or *shouldn't* get deleted. **References:** 1. [The official FAQ post on meta.SO 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.SO 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] [1]: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/193798/130540 [2]: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/5221/130540 [3]: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/92006/130540 [4]: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/22228/130540