What does “bumped to the homepage by the community” mean?

Question

Excuse my ignorance, here.

I don't understand what the "Community" is, in general. Is this an automated algorithm or is this a hidden human "super-admin" for all of Stack Exchange that can override the Mi Yodeya moderators?

I ask this as it relates to my question that I asked a while ago. I answered it, and it has the only answer, there. Why was this questin marked as "bumped to homepage"? What is this "homepage?"

Was it bumped only because I answered my own question and the answer has been sitting around for a long time? What actions can I take to get th emessage removed?

Answer 1

You might have previously noticed posts on the front page that said "modified by Community", but there were no recent edits or additions. Those are the Community bumps mentioned in the Community user's profile -- the idea is to put occasional older questions that could use some more attention in front of people again.

That behavior has been present for many years. What's changed fairly recently is that the post gets a notice saying this is what happened, preventing a lot of head-scratching from people wondering why this two-year-old question is here now.

The Meta.SE FAQ says this about community bumps:

The Community user will bump non-negatively scored, open questions every hour that have at least one answer scoring 0 and none scoring more than that.

• Questions are picked randomly from the top-viewed inactive questions.
• The maximum number of unanswered questions bumped per hour depends on the site: 4 per hour on Stack Overflow, 2 per hour on Super User and Server Fault, and 1 per hour on Meta Stack Exchange and all other sites.

Links on that post explain the criteria in more detail.