Does deleting an answer mark the question as unanswered?

238 seemed very few... I've been lurking round the Ant tag for a while, and expected there should be some of those questions showing up, but there are none. Increased the yield from 238 to around 6 600, and brought in some of the Ant questions I expected to see. I think these are very likely to be safe to delete.

To try and gauge what viewcount would be a valid cutoff I removed that criterion - the result was ~12 000 candidates, of which 119 had 1 000 views or more. Inverting the sort, so that highest number of views are shown first was interesting: three zero-vote no-answer questions, all with over 10K views, all mergees. Followed by only 9 more questions with over 2K5 views.

Clicking through those revealed mostly merged and closed, but one or two that might be worth keeping, plus some woeful tagging (just serial-port?). In the 'mid range' ~500 views - there's again mostly cruft. For stale zero-answer zero-vote questions from OP accounts that have been closed, the view count doesn't matter - the question can be deleted.

I think there should be some onus on the OP to 'tend to their questions needs' - if the OP has not logged in to the site for some period (6 months?) then these ought to be candidates for deletion, probably with looser criteria. For active users with 'stale' questions, why not e-mail them saying their question is a deletion candidate, giving them a chance to try and salvage it? How about joining to the Users table and using a 90-day cutoff, applying to the post and user activity?

(An outer join shows more matches, presumably as for some posts the OP account has been removed.) There are 16 000 of these with under 100 views, rising to 21 000 if the limit is 500 views (i.e. Almost 10% of the headline SO unanswered population). ... so their prospects for revival aren't good.

The SO 'ZUV-ZA' questions, older than 90 days, have accumulated 1.7 million views in total.