Unactive active questions

Question

Occasionally, a question pops to the top of the stack which claims to have been active today, but there is either no evidence of this activity or the activity was an edit that has been un-done, or a deleted answer, or...something else which left the question as it was. Often, the question has a sufficient answer and has no business being at the top.

This happened today, here, on meta: this question mysteriously floated to the top, with no explanation.

Now, I know that an unanswered question will float to the top. However, I thought that these were usually "edited" by a bot (although I cannot find an example at the moment so am not positive). So I suppose my question is two-fold,

• Why do some questions float to the top without explanation. Specifically, why did this one?

• Is there anything that can be done about questions which are at the top due to an un-done edit, or a deleted answer, or some other benign act? (Or, indeed, should anything be done?)

and, as an after-thought, I suppose a third question fits on at the end, although this is slightly irrelevant and has probably been discussed before,

• Is there anything that can be done about answered questions that come to the top due to a benign reason, such as a re-tag?

The motivation for the last question is here, again on meta, where an eight-month old post was retagged. The retag may be useful, but the question has no business being at the top...not really, not anymore!

Answer 1

1. When the Community user bumps a question, it's because that question has no upvoted (or accepted?) answers. The Community user doesn't do anything other than bump in this case; no edits or anything.

2. I don't think anything should be done about this. Unlike the Community user bump this isn't likely to keep occurring to the same question.

3. This strikes me as the same question, but I'll give a different answer: the reason these kinds of things bump questions is transparency. You don't want people to be able to deface old posts without evidence of that defacement surfacing so others can see it.