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There are some questions on this site that meet the criteria for automatic deletion as RemoveAbandonedClosed or RemoveDeadQuestions, but aren't being deleted due to a bug, as they were migrated from another site.

Basically, there's a code optimization that prevents questions that were migrated from other sites and later closed from being deleted by these two Roomba scripts. This optimization is based on an assumption that was true at the time, but is no longer true due to recent feature changes, and isn't true on many older questions (more info in footnote). Taking a cursory look at these questions, most of them don't appear to be suitable additions to the site, but I'm opening this discussion here to provide a list of them and allow the community to discuss whether or not they should be deleted.

At the moment, this bug affects migrated questions closed prior to the concept of migration rejection being a thing. However, it also affects questions that were closed after June 2019 and after the migration stub on the origin site had been deleted.

List of affected questions

And this Meta Super User question: What Stack Exchange site would be best for someone who's thinking about building their first PC?

The questions were taken from this query here. Note that the above list excludes questions that were already deleted since the database was last updated. Also, this is not a complete list: the query excludes questions closed as duplicates, so there are some more questions affected by this bug that are not in the list. Finally, it seems like this site is the most affected by this bug: there are more Super User questions in the list than from any other site.

More information: in the past, all questions that were migrated from other sites and later closed would be marked as "rejected migrations" and would thus be locked, and locked questions were excluded from the affected Roomba criteria. Because it was safe to assume that a closed question that was migrated from another site would also be locked, this code optimization was implemented, perhaps because querying for a question's locked status would take more time.

However, there are two caveats with this assumption: first, prior to 2012, migration rejection wasn't a thing: closing a migrated question wouldn't lock it. Second, in June 2019, the system was changed to no longer mark migrated questions as "rejected" if they were closed a long time after they were migrated. Both of these mean that closing migrated questions doesn't always lock them, and so we end up with the not-true assumption.

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  • So there are maybe 50 questions out of 440,000 on the site that (for whatever reason) has not been automatically deleted? 0.01%. At a quick glance they are closed, so what exactly is the problem? Are you expecting people to go through and manually delete them or do you want SE to fix this "bug"? Are you 100% certain that all these deserve deletion?
    – Mokubai Mod
    Commented May 17, 2020 at 7:49
  • At least a few of them look like they meet the criteria for not being deleted by not being downvoted and by also having answers.
    – Mokubai Mod
    Commented May 17, 2020 at 7:57
  • @Mokubai Questions with only zero- or negatively-scored answers can still be eligible for deletion as RemoveAbandonedClosed. Those are not necessarily exempt from automatic deletion. The purpose of this question is for the community to discuss whether or not they should be deleted (after all, merely qualifying for automatic deletion doesn't necessarily mean it should be deleted). The request for SE to fix this is already posted on the global meta.
    – gparyani
    Commented May 17, 2020 at 8:14

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Personally? Nothing.

Sure they exhibit inconsistent behavior but they're old posts that won't surface unless you're literally looking for posts that meet the roomba criteria and have not.

If they're unsuitable - it might be worth just downvoting or delete voting as you see them, but there's no specific need to hunt these down.

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