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With more Stack Exchange sites being created I typically skim over the Top Questions list for each to quickly see if there is anything interesting to get into.

I've noticed frequently on Programmers that the Top Questions list has a large number of poor questions. Today I specifically counted, 43 questions, 10 were closed, 2 marked as duplicates. 7 had a negative score (some were closed, some were not).

Is there a shortage of questions? Or could there possibly be a better way to create the Top Questions list (maybe excluding closed or down voted questions)?

Thanks to Rachel's comments I'm realizing that the list may not be what I expect it to be. But then should it maybe not be titled "Top Questions"?

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    Should probably note I frequent StackOverflow, SuperUser, WebMasters, Game Development, User Experience. And this is mostly my perception, haven't actual tried quantifying it until today.
    – CLo
    Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 19:47
  • This may be a stupid question, but what do you consider the "Top Questions" list? Do you mean the default home page, which shows the last 50 active questions that have a score over -5?
    – Rachel
    Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 19:52
  • programmers.stackexchange.com it is literally titled "Top Questions" maybe it's just my expectation vs. the title.
    – CLo
    Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 19:56
  • @Rachel but now that you mention it I do realize there are other categorizations and on Stackoverflow it defaults to "Interesting", I'm guessing because I have favorite tags and have used stackoverflow a lot more.
    – CLo
    Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 19:57
  • I was curious about that too, so I looked it up on MSO. Apparently Stack Overflow is the only SE site that has an "Interesting" question list, and all other SE sites default to showing you the last Active questions. You can view this blog post for more details about it :)
    – Rachel
    Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 20:09
  • @Rachel Thanks for the link. So it is something they're working on. I do feel still that there is a disproportionate number of close/negative score questions showing up on Programming versus some of the other SE sites. I'm wondering if it's just a matter of the questions on here or just my perception.
    – CLo
    Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 22:23
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    It's probably just this site. Per this recent answer by a SE employee, we downvote, close, and/or delete over 50% of our questions here.
    – Rachel
    Commented Feb 26, 2013 at 12:50

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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By default, that list is everything that's been recently active (you can change this via the tabs on the right). "Top" in this case is a synonym for "recent" - it's the top of the stack, so to speak.

If you want to see the top-as-in-best questions for the site, check out the Greatest Hits

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  • Is the Greatest Hits link available somewhere on the site? Or do you have to manually type /questions/greatest-hits into the URL to access it?
    – Rachel
    Commented Feb 28, 2013 at 15:07
  • I'm not aware of an obvious link to it anywhere.
    – Shog9
    Commented Feb 28, 2013 at 15:27

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