tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (Deleting junk questions)

Asaf Karagila comments on "Deleting junk questions" (20542)

Asaf Karagila — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 16:32:39 -0800

This was discussed in a recent meta.MO thread, where a question was quickly deleted and the OP did not see the comments explaining why the question even got closed.

On math.SE (and SE 2.0) there is a feature that -4 (or lower) questions do not appear on the front page, unless an edit to the question was made (not even to the answers!). If such feature exists on MO then it's not a bad idea to just downvote the question until it has -4.

Ryan Budney comments on "Deleting junk questions" (20541)

Ryan Budney — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 15:47:12 -0800

They eventually get deleted. We try not to rush the deletion process unless it's clearly some kind of spam attack -- for that there's the "flag as spam" option.

At the current pace, most questions that are completely unsuitable for the site take about 4 days to go from first asked, to deleted. Typically such questions are closed quickly. The extra 3+ days allows the user some time to revise the question so that it could potentially be re-opened. If that doesn't happen, then the question is considered for deletion.

John Bentin comments on "Deleting junk questions" (20537)

John Bentin — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 13:38:16 -0800

I notice that some junk questions, even though closed and down-voted, still linger on the page for a while. These are questions that every established user of the site would agree are obviously inappropriate, without a moment's hesitation; I don't mean borderline questions that perhaps some members would allow. It might not be correct to classify junk questions as spam, because they could have been posted by hand and have some elementary mathematical content. Is there potentially a fast track for removing such questions?