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Related: Question "bumping" - is it ok? (apparently, it is not)

Let's say there is an answered and solved question that was asked back in 2016. It wasn't active for a couple of years. Now a community member edits one of its answers — let's say, by fixing formatting or adding a tag. The question itself bumps to the top of the default "active" questions list.

Is it OK? Should I refrain from editing old questions in order not to bump them? If it is okay, what can I do if I want not to see these "false active" questions and prefer to see only recently asked, commented, or answered ones?

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Why change a typo? Why not fix it? \$\endgroup\$
    – FreezePhoenix
    Commented Jul 19, 2018 at 12:56
  • \$\begingroup\$ @FreezePhoenix it is irrelevant ))) TBH, the specific precedent was changing "wisdom" to "Wisdom" (capitalized) in a question from 2017 \$\endgroup\$
    – enkryptor
    Commented Jul 19, 2018 at 13:00

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It is OK to edit old posts. There are even badges for doing so: Excavator and Archaeologist. Questions and answers are timeless on here, and so is editing them to improve them.

Feel free to make improvements to older material. The bump is so that the community will check your work and ensure there's no funny business going on.

What isn't OK is doing these things solely for bumping. Edits should be a genuine improvement. Sometimes people will make many trivial edits to bump a question, and in those cases they are asked to stop.

what can I do if I want not to see these "false active" questions and prefer to see only recently asked, commented or answered ones?

Well, they're not “false active”, they're genuinely active—they were modified just now.

However, you may visit the questions page and sort by “newest” to see only recently asked questions, by order of how recently they were asked.

There is no way to filter by “recently commented” since comments don't get marked as any sort of activity. There is also no filter that will get you only recent answers or modified recent questions.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ If it is true, why question bumping is frowned on? \$\endgroup\$
    – enkryptor
    Commented Jul 19, 2018 at 11:05
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    \$\begingroup\$ @enkryptor Bumping for the sake of bumping is frowned upon. Edits for the sake of improving the quality of our knowledge base, which happens to involve a bump in order to prompt peer review, is fine and encouraged. The difference is one is improving the overall quality of the site, while the other diminishes it by cluttering the front page with hollow "attention plz!!!!!" activity. If more attention is desired there is already a feature that should be used instead: bounties. \$\endgroup\$
    – doppelgreener
    Commented Jul 19, 2018 at 11:10
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    \$\begingroup\$ An accepted loophole here is that you can completely legitimately bump something by also performing edits. Hence the advice given in that meta Q: you want a bump, so why not make an edit which improves it which will just so happen to also produce a bump? We're fine with this because you improved stuff, good job. It's that mission accomplished thing where you wind up doing things that benefit the whole community. \$\endgroup\$
    – doppelgreener
    Commented Jul 19, 2018 at 11:18
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    \$\begingroup\$ For some reason your "excavation" link is taking me to the Outspoken badge and the "Archeologist" to "dungeons-and-dragons tag bronze". Maybe these links to badges are user dependent? \$\endgroup\$
    – Sdjz
    Commented Jul 19, 2018 at 11:33
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Sdjz Whoops! TIL badge IDs can be different on main vs meta. It should work now. \$\endgroup\$
    – doppelgreener
    Commented Jul 19, 2018 at 12:23
  • \$\begingroup\$ I used exclusively "newest" for the first two years I was participating here, and find that while I still prefer that, now and again viewing "active" doesn't change the user experience significantly. \$\endgroup\$
    – KorvinStarmast
    Commented Jul 19, 2018 at 18:11

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