When a user edits her/his own question frequently, it's ensured that it stays high up on the front-page. This is an easy way of continously bumping one's own question up. Is this desired? (How) Can this be prevented?
Edit: I am not asking whether it can be prevented that my question is bumped up when I edited it, but whether it can (or should) be prevented/discouraged that users bump their questions by making minor edits
There is no formal way of preventing this behaviour as editing a post is assumed to improve it, and the subsequent bump is a by-product.
Since the site is community driven, improper use of this technique can be discussed in the chat room - to seek confirmation (just to make sure you're not seeing things that aren't there) and perhaps brought to moderator attention. They would be able to super-ping the user (if they're not in the chat room already) requesting a change in behaviour if deemed necessary (with an accompanying explanation of why meaningless edits are not helpful) or perform more rigorous actions.
My (a general) suggestion would be to stagger edits when editing multiple questions rather than lumping them together at one time. Also, avoid deliberately staggering edits to a single question. While this still dilutes the front page, at least it doesn't bombard it and/or bury other active posts.
According to the help topic What should I do if no one answers my question? users are encouraged to "edit your question to provide status and progress updates. Document your own continued efforts to answer your question. This will naturally bump your question to the homepage and get more people interested in it."
Even if someone edits their question only in order to bump it to the front page, I didn't think that was a problem. It demonstrates that they are still interested in getting their question answered, or might not have gotten the answer they needed. I just started using StackExchange a few months ago and after reading through the help topics this is exactly how I thought I should be doing it. If someone abuses the feature then actions can be taken either by downvoting or by bringing it to moderator attention as suggested.
Since this is the way StackExchange works, I assume it is absolutely OK. If not, I am sure this feature will be removed.
Regularly, I reread my own questions and answers. If I see errors, or a sentence that should be rephrased to improve the language, I will do that.
It's annoying and people shouldn't do it because it is annoying. That should be an enough preventive indication.
Sorry. I didn´t know this happened. And I believe I may speak for others too.
Only after reading this post I find out that questions/answers get bumped by making minor edits. And that it´s annoying. Now I realise both of them.
Also, we could take into account:
If a question is bad then people would downvote/close it. If that does not happen, and we assume the question is intrinsically worth asking / answering, then the bump should have no significant effect in the long run I feel.
Maybe it's slightly out of scope, but if you notice abuse of that feature, maybe you can document properties of the behaviour (e.g. "100 updates per day" or sth like that) and than propose to StackExchange (as it's feature generally available on many sites) some kind of throttling (for example "move question up, on first 50 edits of given question per day. Move question up also if user did not exceeded 1000 edits per day on given site.", etc.). Such kind of throttling such allow people to continue edits, but prevent them from making it in robotic abusive manner to be constantly on top. Aparat from this, I bare that "downvoting bit" mentined by @kabZX , place role in making this system healthy by-itself.
