up vote 33 down vote favorite

We have over 13,000 questions with no answers, this feels somewhat like a concern to me.

Some other ideas than just answering include:

  • Give bounties to the highest voted questions, helping them get answered.

  • Spit through the negative and zero vote questions at the end, either ...

    • ... get rid of crap by closing questions that don't fit Super User.

    • ... upvote and edit questions to fit Super User more, the latter bumps it so people see the Q.

So, with this meta discussion I would like to call to action to find proper ways to lower this number and to actually get this number down together. It's as easy as clicking Unanswered on the front page, then no answers and working through that list from front to end, or from end to front, or going to a random page number and starting from there.

For those bored or burning out from reviewing, and other enthusiasts...

Let's get some more questions answered!

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Which is why I delete any crappy ones I encounter in the review queue, they won't make anyone coming here from Google happy – Ivo Flipse♦ Aug 11 '12 at 11:07
It would be interesting go find out how many has zero answers and how many only have non upvoted answers. – Nifle Aug 12 '12 at 8:11
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@Nifle: Since it's the no answers tab... All of them. – Tom Wijsman Aug 12 '12 at 12:22
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@Nifle About twice as many if you also count those without up voted or accepted answers, ~26,700. – Daniel Beck♦ Aug 12 '12 at 16:47
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I spend all of my time in Unanswered anyway, so I'm all for sorting this area out. I like the suggestions you've provided, including bumping older ones (and I've been closing a lot more questions now with the new Review section too). – Randolph West Aug 13 '12 at 5:32
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Deleting the crappy ones is a good thing - to be honest, I can't count the amount of time I've gone through unanswered to realize I've just answered a post from many years ago. I don't know how any automated process can work though - just because someone doesn't have an answer doesn't mean there are not answers which may help others with a similar problem. I think it will be interesting to see what decision SU takes. – Dave Rook Sep 4 '12 at 10:52
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Actually, the website could generate an email to the user after X months to see if this question is still active. If they fail to keep it confirm solved or not, then remove it. This is obviously easier when no one has provided any answer at all! – Dave Rook Sep 4 '12 at 12:09
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I don't think we're going to cut down on that number any time soon. I'd settle for a way to flag a question "seen it, not interested" so that I don't keep seeing the same stuff every time I search for interesting unanswered questions. – Isaac Rabinovitch Sep 7 '12 at 3:38

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