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One of the things that the Community user does is:

  • Randomly poke old unanswered questions every hour so they get some attention

Is there a way we can make this less random? It seems like it's always poking Purim questions around Sukkot, or Noach questions around Shavuot. Is there a way we can have it "prefer" certain date ranges for certain tags?

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    This would have to be done by Devs. We have no control over it as is.
    – Double AA Mod
    Nov 7 '13 at 1:41
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    @DoubleAA is there an MSO post about this? Likely not since their problem domain isn't time-bound. I'd imagine that maybe other communities would have something like that, though, no? Cooking - Autumn-themed meals? Parenting - dressing warm for winter? Writing - Finding candles that'll burn long enough during the winter that don't make your house smell like whale fat?
    – Charles Koppelman
    Nov 7 '13 at 1:42
  • @CharlesKoppelman Stack Exchange has users in both the northern and southern hemispheres. :-)
    – Monica Cellio
    Nov 7 '13 at 3:06
  • @MonicaCellio Well fine, what about Gaming SE's pinging the games whose sequels are about to come out/just came out, or something something Christmas? Or making those seasonal winter questions pop up in both December and June? I understand this is a big ask both of devs and moderator time, and probably not worthwhile. It's just a low-priority feature to add to the wishlist, really.
    – Charles Koppelman
    Nov 7 '13 at 3:13
  • @CharlesKoppelman now you're talking! Those Diablo-3 questions just aren't so timely today, and ditto the SF&F questions on the last Star Trek movie. :-)
    – Monica Cellio
    Nov 7 '13 at 3:24
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The idea of the 'poking' is to churn content that didn't receive much attention back to the front page, and there's no technical reason to favorite one tag or date range over another when it comes to that, at least as far as the purpose of the feature.

The point is to have folks look and see why those questions never received much attention, because in many cases it's due to a problem with the question itself. This is really the last net we have before posts just sort of fall between the cracks, so it's the last chance to curate content that's worth keeping.

I see the utility of what you're proposing, but I'm rather reluctant to add any more squelch to this than we already have through users having the ability to ignore certain tags. If we did this, we'd still need to make sure we got eyes on stuff community would stop poking, which means quite a bit of fiddling in /review again, or possibly adding a new queue.

I'm not sure if the payoff to work ratio is high enough here.

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  • To be clear, I agree that it's probably more buck than the bang is worth, but I am not suggesting that Community ignores anything. Just that, e.g., it is more likely to poke a Chanukah-tagged item in Kislev. I understand not wanting to add complexity to what must already be a messy calculation.
    – Charles Koppelman
    Nov 10 '13 at 3:16
  • @CharlesKoppelman It might not be that hard, but I have to look into how it could be weighted. I'm not going to put a status on this as I'd like to research and (likely) discuss it with a few folks. This'll take a bit of time, but I will come back to this in the coming weeks with something a little more concrete as far as an answer goes. I like the utility of it, I just need to investigate the cost.
    – Tim Post
    Nov 11 '13 at 15:48

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