Active Questions and Late Answers

Question

I was browsing Arqade today and saw this question, What are the differences between the Wii and Xbox One/PS4/Switch versions of Just Dance Games?, became active today (1/31/21). I am curious why it is active if the last comments/posts are from a year ago. I looked at this question on Meta, Why are some posts marked as highly active and others are not?, and saw they could be protected because of deleted and low-quality answers. Since I am not at 10,000 Rep, I would never know this. How would someone like me know why a post became active?

While researching the Meta Active Question, I stumbled across this question, Do we really have 1.7k late answers to review?. I have been hesitant to answer questions that are older because (A), I don't want to burden the Moderators and higher-rep people with an answer to an old question; and (B), If I post an answer, and someone doesn't review my answer, does it just get lost in limbo, never to be seen by anyone else?

This is my first Meta post. Please let me know how to improve, and feel free to edit my question!

Answer 1

I was browsing Arqade today and saw this question, What are the differences between the Wii and Xbox One/PS4/Switch versions of Just Dance Games?, became active today (1/31/21).

The community bot will periodically bump old questions without any upvoted answers, provided the question has a positive score. I believe the exact thresholds for bumping vary from site to site, but community will still go around bumping old question.

You can tell it was community that bumped this by looking at the last activity on the post, which was from Community:

I have been hesitant to answer questions that are older because (A), I don't want to burden the Moderators and higher-rep people with an answer to an old question; and (B), If I post an answer, and someone doesn't review my answer, does it just get lost in limbo, never to be seen by anyone else?

Never be afraid to answer old questions! Unlike forums, we encourage users to post answers to questions which either lack a quality answer, or are just in need of an updated answer. When you post such an answer the post will be bumped to the front page so that users can see it, so there's no need to worry about your answer sitting around in limbo. Quite the opposite, actually! The question was sitting around in limbo before a new answer brought it back to life again.

Answer 2

In addition to Wipqozn's answer, sometimes new users leave answers that are:

1. Blatantly vandalism and/or spam
2. Non-answers (questions, comments, etc.)
3. Low Quality

These answers are typically deleted quickly.

You can easily see this because if a 1 reputation user made it active, and there is no apparent activity, this happened.