Why are old questions (mid 2015 I.e.) re-appearing as "active" in the stackexchange app on Android, even if they have not been recently modified? Personally I think it doesn't make sense to "bump" them up by the system, since the half life of video, especially video-software questions, is really fast...
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1 Answer
This is an automatic feature of the system. The community user occasionally bumps posts that it thinks could benefit from attention up in the system. You can read more details about the process here.
It is intended to encourage review of content that hasn't been touched. Users that look at it can either vote the question down if it is no longer relevant (which will prevent it from appearing once it goes negative) or can vote up a useful answer to acknowledge that there is a worthy solution (which will also prevent it from coming up again.)
Sometimes this works better than others, but overall it isn't that bad of a process because it is easy enough to make the necessary changes to prevent them from coming up again, it just helps prevent stale data by bringing things up that need to be worked on in one way or another, whether to reduce the relevance of the question, to acknowledge the relevance of an answer, or to find an answer for a relevant question that is yet to be answered.
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Well, then the logic behind this automated process doesn't work well at all. I think bumping this thread as active (and this is only one example of a fairly recent thread, there were really old questions brought back from the dead) video.stackexchange.com/questions/15897/… is not useful. If maya has the same release Cycle as other software, the version in question is already outdated, the user is definitely not interested in an answer anymore and has moved on so even IF somebody answers this now, it is kind of wasted energy... Mar 29, 2016 at 5:33
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In this case it's even worse since the user answered his own question but then didn't accept his own answer... Mar 29, 2016 at 5:37
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The logic works exactly as described on that post - "The Community user will bump non-negatively scored questions that have at least one answer scoring 0 and none scoring more than that. Questions are picked randomly from the top-viewed inactive questions."– Dr Mayhem ModMar 29, 2016 at 12:23
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@HansMeiser - I would disagree that an answer now would be a waste of time. While new versions have possibly come out, the changes between versions are often limited, especially when it comes to configuration for things like Mental Ray. A general configuration question for Mental Ray is likely to span many generations of the software and will likely still be a useful answer for years yet to come. That said, in this case, the OP's answer is actually quite succinct and correct, so additional answers probably aren't needed, but bumping it did allow for a good answer to be up voted.– AJ Henderson ModMar 29, 2016 at 13:24
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Well, I will look out for other examples (because there were a lot lately) where questions are referring to totally outdated circumstances or technologies but are bumped anyway. Mar 29, 2016 at 13:28
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Two answers, both valid, none accepted... video.stackexchange.com/q/17024/13978 Mar 30, 2016 at 22:54
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The difference between video production and other stackexchange sites is that video production has a fairly low volume of new questions over a day. So the ratio between old questions coming back from the dead is much higher than elsewhere. I like to help out people but I find it fairly annoying to always check if a question is from 2014 before I write an answer... Personally I have no desire to comment or answer on questions that not even the OP has any interest in anymore. Mar 30, 2016 at 22:58