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I just answered this question that community brought up, because the question had a score of 5, and the two answers were not getting any hits and I considered they were not answering well the simple question which got these 5 votes.

Now I checked and the user who asked the question came only on July 8, 2014 and has not been seen since.

Maybe Community should check , and if there is no interest on the part of the questioner to look for answers , it is a one off, and the answers have not gotten any up votes the question should not be brought up again ,and maybe even deleted ?. I am suggesting deletion because such simple minded questions with wishy washy answers ( maybe mine too) do not reflect well on the site, with search engines, for example.

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Well, now that your answer has been upvoted by somebody, at least that question won't be bumped anymore. Not that that addresses the problem at all.

I do usually look at community bumped questions to see if there actually is an answer that deserves an upvote and just never got one. In some ways, that means it serves a purpose even if the original poster is long gone and no longer interested in returning. It would be a shame for a great question with an awesome answer that went unnoticed at the time to never be noticed again just because the person who asked it disappeared without a trace.

I also like to take the time when community bumps something to evaluate whether we just missed a reason to close it earlier. Maybe it is a homework question, or maybe it's a duplicate (and it's possible a newer question asks the same thing and got good answers, so the bumped one should be closed -- chronological order isn't required for deciding which in a set to close).

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that community bumping questions gives all of us an opportunity to:

  1. Decide if the question is on topic/not duplicate/etc when it may have been missed before;
  2. Answer a question that may have been unanswered before or had mediocre answers;
  3. Upvote a great answer that may have been missed at the time but deserves to be upvoted.

None of those things depend on whether the original poster(s) are still around. In some ways, I see community bumps as another type of review queue.

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The usual line is that answer are not just for the OP, but also for people who find the question later---and given that the majority of our traffic comes from search engines that is potentially a lot of people. SO the argument goes on to suggest that un-answered questions are a blemish, and even if the asker will never return again and getting some kind of up-vote worthy answer is an improvement.

I don't know that the argument really holds for particularly poor questions, but it is true of some long-unanswered questions.

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