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As the weekends are quite quiet around these parts, how do we feel about using that time to tidy up some of the old off-topic questions on this site?

I previously asked a question here about whether or not we should close off-topic questions, which met with some acceptance (well, a few comments and a couple of upvotes) but instead of this being a mod-only task if people are on this site over the weekend while it's pretty quiet then why not start surfing back in time and find questions that should be closed off / deleted? These old posts can be flagged for mod attention, or close-voted (if you have the required reputation).

If questions have received answers with upvotes already then we'd probably only close those rather than delete so that no reputation hit happens for those users, but there are plenty of off-topic questions (icon requests, what's your favourite mcguffin, what's a good example of blah...) that could do with being cleaned up or closed off.

So, if you're looking for something to do at the weekend and want to help keep the quality up on this site while helping to ensure no off-topic questions be asked on this site where people can say 'well, this subject was perfectly OK in this historic post, so why not now?' then feel free to get your flagging fingers out and travel back in time to the heady days of 2010! Questions from back then were pretty unique.

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    Sometimes I have the urge to ask a question like Example of your best favourite icon? and measure how many seconds it will be open for answers :-)
    – Benny Skogberg
    May 18, 2012 at 11:32
  • @BennySkogberg I'd give it approximately T minus I-find-it seconds
    – Ben Brocka
    May 18, 2012 at 18:30
  • Just a note so that no one expends effort on a duplicate search....I just flagged all icon requests (or at least all that showed up with a search for "icon") through the end of 2011.
    – Graham Herrli
    Mar 20, 2013 at 14:53

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Flag ALL the (low quality) things! Remember if the post is really old, you should probably raise a flag as opposted to voting to close; closevotes are nearly invisible for old questions, especially since we don't have as many users as stack overflow.

In addition, remember to flag Not an Answer/spam/useless answers while you're at it. In searches it's pretty easy to skim question titles and find out what to close, finding not-answers is a lot harder. Do the mods a favor and flag not-answers

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Splendid idea Jon! I think this is a good idea since I answered one of those old questions “an example of…” which got closed immediately. So I think it’s best to close questions that are off topic now even if they were not when they got asked.

After a while when the worst questions are gone, one can safely rely on that old content is still valid. I’ll shot some flags and close votes this weekend.

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