A simple rule, if a community question goes unanswered for 24 hours (or 48 hours in smaller communities) it should be escalated.
Why not set-up a simple mailing list which all superusers are subscribed to. Any questions which are not answered within 24/48 hours are pushed to the list (in a digest) for your expert members to answer.
If they’re still not answered within 48 hours, have another list which escalates the question to customer support (because some questions require trained staff with access to a user’s account to answer).
If you’re going to take the monumental effort of creating a community where members can ask questions, take the significantly smaller effort of designing a system to guarantee they get answers to those questions.
Set the auto-bump interval in the category settings.
Only open topics are bumped, so if completed / solved / finished topics are properly closed as “done”, that leaves only the open topics to choose from.
Also I am not sure Richard has entirely thought this through – as one of the founders of Stack Overflow I can tell you this “solution” kinda misses the mark for public support forums. For example, it’d keep nagging people about really bad questions or super obscure questions. If we’re talking about a fully paid support solution, where the question volume is low and all questions are vetted, this makes more sense.
This feature is incredibly useful for a number of things I was thinking about, thank you. I don’t think it’s right for this particular use case because I wouldn’t want to close topics that I don’t want to bump anymore.
Also I am not sure Richard has entirely thought this through – as one of the founders of Stack Overflow I can tell you this “solution” kinda misses the mark for public support forums. For example, it’d keep nagging people about really bad questions or super obscure questions. If we’re talking about a fully paid support solution , where the question volume is low and all questions are vetted, this makes more sense.
I’ll add one more use case to yours, which is in new forums that need proof of value, and where new users need education on what makes a good post. I agree that this isn’t right for everything.