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Quite often some old questions are bumped for various reasons.

  • They are edited to correct minor typos, punctuation, adding links, adding a more informative title etc.
  • They are retagged - e.g. for the reason they were incorrectly tagged or for the reason that we are in process of removing some tags.

Improving old posts is a good thing - this seems to be general consensus, see e.g. the discussion here: When does editing become over editing? Similarly, having the questions correctly tagged is useful.

But we also must be careful not to flood the front page with old posts, bumped only because of some minor edits or retags. Many people have complained about this (both in the past and very recently).

I believe it would be useful to have at least some rough criterion, based on which the users doing retags and improving old posts can decide whether they can do the edit or it would be better to wait.

  • How many bumped old questions in the pages with most recent activity would be too much? How much are you willing to tolerate?

I did not open a separate thread for meta; where the criterion should probably be different - because of the different nature of meta and because of the fact that it has much less posts. I think it's ok to give your opinion about bumping at meta here.

DISCLAIMER: It is not always easy to notice the bumped old questions among other active questions - but I don't want to discuss this problem here. (If needed, we can open a separate thread for that.) The purpose of this thread is only to give some reasonable suggestions about the quantity of bumps to people who want edit/retag old questions.

TERMINOLOGY: For the purpose of this thread, let us say that a bumped old question means a question bumped because some improvement of an old post (older than a week) or because of retagging. If a questions is bumped because of new answer or because of a major addition to an answer/to a question, it is a completely different thing.

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I think that having 5 bumped old questions between the last 50 recently active questions at the main site is ok, but going much higher would not be good.

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  • $\begingroup$ How is that in time (hours) approximately? I once edited 7 in approx. 2 hours $\endgroup$
    – user486983
    Nov 25, 2019 at 21:07
  • $\begingroup$ @Isabella It seems that now the sites gets about 600 questions per day, which means 50 new questions in 2 hours. Since on the front page there are also posts that were bumped for other reasons, I would guess that currently the recently active 50 questions correspond to activity in the last hour. It is also possible to check whether some old posts have been bumped using search with restriction on creation date. $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Nov 25, 2019 at 21:31
  • $\begingroup$ I will add that the numbers in this post can be considered simply as a rough guidelines, not as exact numbers which have to be followed. (I am pretty sure that on several occasions I have bumped more posts than recommended here myself.) And we should also keep in mind that the site has grown a lot since this discussion. $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Nov 25, 2019 at 21:32
  • $\begingroup$ ok. so approx. 10 edits in approx 2 hours, it's fine right? $\endgroup$
    – user486983
    Nov 25, 2019 at 21:45
  • $\begingroup$ @user486983 10 edits in approx 2 hours by all the interested editors is fine :-). Your quota of those depends on how many users are on an edit spree simultaneously. $\endgroup$
    – Jyrki Lahtonen
    Aug 25, 2021 at 17:40
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I think that having 1 or 2 bumped old questions among the last 10 questions at meta is ok.

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Edits take longer, and hopefully more thought, than retagging, and so are less likely to be done en masse. If this is the case, it would seem that retagging sprees cause most of the flooding of the front page.

It might be nice to have an option (e.g. selectable in the profile or on the questions page) that would order posts on the questions page without regard to retagging actions.

Alternatively, simply don't bump posts for retagging.

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    $\begingroup$ The suggestions that retagging should not cause bumping was given here some time ago - I am not sure whether we can expect this to be implemented. I liked Willie's comment in the same discussion with the suggestion that the type of the last activity would be shown. This would make recognizing bumped posts easier. (Which is, I guess, the purpose of your suggestion about adding new option.) $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Sep 3, 2012 at 12:19
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My personal limit is: at most three bumps per day.

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