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Scrolling up through the Crusade of Answers chat room and looking at the Unanswered Tracker, there are about two to three hundred new unanswered questions on this site every day … except for on Saturdays. Each Saturday the unanswered question count drops pretty consistently by about one hundred questions.

Why is this? How much of this is due to fewer people asking questions on Saturday, versus users coming through and answering questions that didn't receive attention during the week?

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    $\begingroup$ People have more free time to answer questions on Saturdays? What kind of answer are you expecting here...? I doubt someone is going to provide more than speculation. $\endgroup$
    – Najib Idrissi
    Nov 16, 2016 at 7:58
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    $\begingroup$ There are a few scripts that run weekly instead of daily, handling some questions. For instance, non-positive score questions with at most 1 comment and no answers are automatically deleted after some number of months of low views. I don't remember when these run, but I wouldn't be surprised if they ran on Friday nights. $\endgroup$
    – davidlowryduda Mod
    Nov 16, 2016 at 8:15
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    $\begingroup$ @NajibIdrissi I was hoping that someone with access to site analytics could answer. I think someone could just look up whether there are fewer questions or more answers on Saturdays. Or I hadn't even considered the question-deletion scripts that mixedmath brought up. $\endgroup$
    – Mike Pierce
    Nov 16, 2016 at 16:31
  • $\begingroup$ BTW questions and answers are not the only things which can influence number of unanswered questions. As we saw, there are also deletions. And question can stop count as unanswered thanks to an upvote on an answer. $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Nov 17, 2016 at 0:53

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I will copy the relevant part from this answer on meta.SE: What is the cause of this sudden drop in CV queue size?

The cause was our weekly task that deletes old, abandoned questions. Unlike our daily task, which is scheduled for 3 AM UTC, the weekly task is scheduled for anytime on Saturday (actually, it's 7 days since the last run, on a Saturday, so this will cause the time to shift).

So it is very likely that the feed which posts number of unanswered question in the mentioned chat room makes the post on Saturday after the script which deletes abandoned question. The relevant messages can be found here and here. I will add that some users have wondered about this in chat, and clean-up scripts were suggested as a possible explanation. See, for example, here.

Although there are some irregularities. For example, there was decrease on June 28, which was Tuesday and we saw increase the Saturday before that. If I had to guess, maybe sometimes the script does not run as scheduled and has to be restarted manually.

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