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I've noticed recently that a lot of old questions are showing up in the main feed on the site (what you get when you go to rpg.stackexchange.com under 'Top Questions' without applying any filters). This is, presumably, because people are editing old answers or are answering old questions.

Is the Stack algorithm bumping old questions up and making them more visible to users or what? I keep seeing questions there that I think are new that turn out to be quite old (on the order of years in most cases).

When I click 'Questions' on the main site and sort by newest, I get what I would normally expect to see on the main feed (new questions, sorted by their "newness").

To be clear, my question is specifically regarding the behavior of the main site feed -- the display of questions on the default rpg.stackexchange.com 'Top Questions' listing, which seems to have a lot of activity from very old questions lately. It's not a concern or a problem, just wondering if the behavior of the main feed has been modified in some way, because it seems, well, different.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ So it's not just this? \$\endgroup\$
    – Hey I Can Chan
    Nov 15, 2016 at 20:19
  • \$\begingroup\$ @HeyICanChan I am aware of the "Community bumper," but if it were that, I'd expect this phenomenon wouldn't seem new to me. Today and yesterday I've noticed a lot more activity on old posts than I seem to remember. I'm willing to accept that it's just me, but it seems at least one other person has noticed this behavior as well. Then again, that could just be confirmation bias. In either case, I've edited to my question to more accurately reflect what I'm trying to figure out. \$\endgroup\$
    – LegendaryDude
    Nov 15, 2016 at 20:22
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    \$\begingroup\$ I bumped half a dozen Dark Heresy questions that had the old version-less tag from before there was a 2nd edition. Add a coincidental few people arriving from Google to an old question that they answer, and a handful of regulars tweaking their old answers, and it starts to look like a bunch. \$\endgroup\$
    – SevenSidedDie
    Nov 16, 2016 at 2:03

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If you run through some examples, the reason for the bumps will be made clear.

Sometimes they are duplicates/related questions to newer questions that get attention that way.

Sometimes they are victims of zealous retagging from when a new tagging scheme for a game system is devised on Meta.

Sometimes it's something else, but examples would help. All these always happen, but as with any other human endeavour there are ebbs and flows. Also, new questions have been down since early October so these would be more visible.

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