<p>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) - <em>that's not what this question is about.</em></p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Here are the automatic deletion rules:</p> <p><strong>9 Days</strong></p> <p>If a question was <strong>closed</strong> more than <code>9</code> days ago, and ...</p> <ul> <li>was not closed as a duplicate</li> <li>has a score of 0 or less</li> <li>is not locked</li> <li>has no answers with a score > 0</li> <li>has no accepted answer</li> <li>has no pending reopen votes</li> <li>has not been edited in the past <code>9</code> days</li> </ul> <p>... it will be automatically deleted. This check is run every day.</p> <p><strong>30 Days</strong></p> <p>If a question (<strong>open or closed</strong>) is more than <code>30</code> days old, and ...</p> <ul> <li>has −1 or lower score</li> <li>has no answers</li> <li>is not locked</li> </ul> <p>...or if it was closed and migrated to a different site...</p> <p>... it will be automatically deleted. This check is run every week. (0300 UTC on Saturday, to be precise.)</p> <p><strong>1 Year</strong></p> <p>If a question (<strong>open or closed</strong>) is more than <code>365</code> days old, and ...</p> <ul> <li>has a score of 0 <em>or</em> a score of 1 with a deleted owner</li> <li>has no answers</li> <li>is not locked</li> <li>has a viewcount <= the age of the question in days times 1.5</li> <li>has 1 or 0 comments</li> </ul> <p>... it will be automatically deleted. This check is also run once a week.</p> <p><strong>Duplicates</strong></p> <p>I am <a href="http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/193798/130540">awaiting clarification on what happens with questions closed as being duplicates.</a> 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 <em>shouldn't</em> get deleted.</p> <p><strong>References:</strong></p> <ol> <li><p><a href="http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/5221/130540">The official FAQ post on meta.SO about how deleting works.</a> The first answers includes the rules for automatic deletion, and links to more detailed explanations given in the next reference.</p></li> <li><p><a href="http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006/130540">The post on meta.SO that most clearly states when "bad" posts are automatically deleted.</a> This includes a new rule for automatic deletion that was added in June 2013.</p></li> <li><p>Since the automatic delete rules mention <a href="http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/22228/130540">locked questions, here's the official FAQ post on those.</a></p></li> </ol>