8

I quite frequently see old questions reappear on the front page of TeX questions, under which it says "modified Xm ago". Here's a current example:

enter image description here

But when I look at the question, in this case An Error with XeLaTeX and fontspec, I can't see any new activity whatsoever. I see this quite often (in this case it says it was modified by 'Community', but it often has a user's name there as well).

Can someone explain what's going on here?

| |
  • 1
    The posts you see floated to the front page are old and have no answers scoring above 0: meta.stackexchange.com/a/19739/263287 It's one way the site brings low-activity questions to the user's attention; either to promote up-voting of a good answer or, in the event an answer is bad or non-existent, to prompt a (better) answer. – Paul Gessler Oct 6 '14 at 10:49
  • But I can swear I see this in questions marked as "modified Xm ago" followed by a real user's name, too. – Sverre Oct 6 '14 at 11:30
  • You mean like this one? These could be spam edits or other inappropriate/unnecessary edits that made it through the review process initially, but were ultimately reverted. – Paul Gessler Oct 6 '14 at 11:51
  • @PaulGessler Yes, that's a good example. But I assumed that edits of any kind would say "edited [new date]" under the edited question or answer. But apparently not ... ? – Sverre Oct 6 '14 at 12:28
  • If an edit is rolled back, it will still show. But I suspect that those with the 10k Trusted User tools and moderators are able to revert/remove edits in other ways that are not visible in the history to us mere mortals. :-) Ultimately, only someone with 10k/mod powers can confirm this, but it's just my suspicion. – Paul Gessler Oct 6 '14 at 14:05
7

The Community user periodically bumps unanswered questions to get more eyeballs on them.

There (probably) are other ways a question could get "bumped" by a regular user and yet look like there are no changes. One way would be for someone to post a spam answer that's then removed. If/when you see other examples, let me know and I'll see what happened with those specific cases.

| |

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .