What's the deal with Community bumping obsolete questions? Necromancer bot?

Question

I'm looking for new 'hot' Minecraft questions on the main page, and what do I find?

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Minecraft 1.9 freezes if I click on things too quickly

Asked shortly after the 1.9 release in 2016. The problem in question existed for a short while and has been fixed ages ago. The question went through two cosmetic edits since then, last in April, 2016, and has been bumped by Community User 5 times since, including today.

Why can't I destroy blocks or hit people in multiplayer and in single player on diamond dimensions?

Asked Mar 28 '15. Last (cosmetic) edit next day. The modpack in question has been updated many, many times over the years making the original question largely irrelevant. The question - bumped today by Community User.

How to disable/enable land protection without losing ownership list in a minecraft server?

Created 2015, bumped today for no apparent reason.

Minecraft disconnection timeout, aiding bad connection players

November 2015, Technical Support for Modded Minecraft question, (a community-specific close reason) bumped twice, including today.

Why aren't iron golems spawning in my iron farm?

A pre-1.14 iron farm in Minecraft, bumped by 'Community User' 7 times, 6 of which it was already obsolete, after 1.14 release where the mechanics of iron farms changed fundamentally.

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Seems like actions of a bot dabbling in necromancy, arbitrary pointless bumps creating useless noise, burying new, valid questions and wasting people's time.

Answer 1

I'm looking for new 'hot' Minecraft questions on the main page

Have you considered creating a filter?

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To address your actual question though:

Coming from other sites, like Reddit or forums, there's a certain mindset that old posts and discussions should be left alone. And that makes sense on those sites, as they are sites that facilitate discussion - the discussion is only relevant for a certain time period after which, if you want to bring it up again, it makes more sense to start a new thread.

Arqade is not a forum

We are a Q&A site - and our model is kinda like Wikipedia - we want our questions and answers to be periodically maintained - kept relevant & up to date, or closed and deleted when they are no longer applicable.

Thus, whenever a post is edited, or a new answer is posted, it is bumped to the front page, so that other members of the community are aware of content that may require their attention, and they can interact with it accordingly (vote, comment, edit, rollback etc etc).

What's that got to do with the Community User?

Well, Community user bumps for basically the same reason, but with the added parameter of lapsed time: posts are bumped so that the community is aware of content that may require their attention.

From What can cause a question to be bumped?

• The Community user will bump non-negatively scored, open questions every hour that have at least one answer scoring 0 and none scoring more than that

If the Community user could think and speak, what it's basically saying is "Hmm, this is a decent question, and it has an answer, but noone has voted on it! Hey, can someone take a look please? Is this a good or bad answer?"

Here's some other interesting observations of how the Community user will decide on what to bump:

• Questions are picked randomly from the top-viewed questions with last activity more than 30 days ago.
• Once a question is bumped, it will be ineligible for bumping for the next 120 days, unless it receives new activity after the last bump. (Bumping a question counts as new activity, so at a given time, questions bumped within the last 30 days are guaranteed not to be bumped.)
• The maximum number of unanswered questions bumped per hour depends on the site: 4 per hour on Stack Overflow, 2 per hour on Super User and Server Fault, and 1 per hour on Meta Stack Exchange and all other sites.
• Some sites have limits on how many auto-bumped questions can appear on the homepage. Once the limit is reached, no more questions will be bumped until one or more bumped questions disappears off the homepage.

What can be done about it?

Well, it may seem flippant to say it this way but... review the posts that Community bumps. You linked This Minecraft 1.9 bug post as an example, and say that the bug was fixed ages ago. Is there an answer on the post that says that? If so, consider upvoting it. If there isn't an answer like that, then perhaps you should be the one to leave that answer! :)