so..... gromit can see 899 answers in Football, but only 19 questions (same as me). That suggests each question gets 40-odd answers - would that be right?
What strange functionality. How can it possibly be any help to the user to display only 19 questions when there are 516? If like me you remember a post by the time of year it was posted, then cutting out questions after 6 weeks is very unhelpful. I am sure this has not always been the case.
I'm not sure what the issue is. There are tabs for recent questions and there are other tabs for all unanswered and answered questions going back over many years.
Am I missing the point of the question and some of the replies- such as Gromit's.
Are some people here suggesting we should dispense with Recent Questions as the default tab and have all Answered questions displayed?
The default view, when you click on any of AB's sections,is to show the 'Most Recent' tab. Only posts from the past month are shown there. (So there could be many hundreds in Chatterbank and none at all in a little used subsection).
As has been noted above, the 'Answered' and 'Unanswered' tabs will still show older posts.
The default tab is: "most recent" - and to save loading everything, we only show stuff from the last 3 months (irrc).
"Answered" shows all questions in a category which have received answers.
We inherited a structure for the site which was built in 2000, and we've kept it mostly to preserve the links and relationships with other sites we had/have.
Could it be more "sensible" if we redesigned it today? Definitely!