I'm in favor of removing the view requirement entirely to disable the 365 day pass of deleted questions, as in Stevoisiak's post, but I'd like to add some more thoughts to my reasoning than just what they covered.
According to the help article on these auto deletions, the motivation for this feature was to avoid old questions clogging up search results:
Abandoned, unanswered questions can be a nuisance for readers when they appear in search results. While every question deserves a chance to be answered, at some point the annoyance to those searching for a solution outweighs the increasingly-small chance that an answer will be provided.
With this motivation in mind, I'd ask a few questions:
Do old questions not deserve a chance at an answer?
This feature seems to take as a given that, as a question becomes older, it is not only less likely to receive an answer- it will eventually reach a threshold where it no longer deserves an answer.
It is true, especially for technologies, that many questions will become relevant to fewer people over time as their topic becomes older and fewer people engage with it in the first place. I mean, odds are, nobody's ever going to answer another question about IE6 on SO.
But I don't think that means old questions are never deserving of an answer. The cost of keeping the question around, relative to even the tiniest chance that somebody with the knowledge and inclination comes along to answer it, seems like a worthwhile trade. The opportunity cost seems quite low!
And this goes doubly so for games- tons of people go out of their way to play old games, and so old questions stand a chance of receiving an answer every time somebody picks up an old title again.
Aren't unanswered questions still useful?
I'm sure there are plenty of users who just want to find a solution to whatever problem they have, apply that solution, and move on with their lives. For them, unanswered questions are a probably nuisance.
But I suspect that, for most users, most questions are timeless even when lacking an answer. There is value in knowing that somebody else had the same question as you. This is especially true here, because unlike many old technologies, people are still playing old games!
And this isn't the only case for the importance of unanswered questions. Questions like this one are separated from deletion by exactly one comment, and questions with a single comment are relatively common. Some of these even have an answer in that one comment. (And I'll grant, this is not the appropriate way to use the site- but that's a different problem!)
With questions that are technically unanswered still presenting the potential to be useful to someone, and no certain way to programmatically separate dead-end questions from ones that may become useful, I'd say there's no reason not to keep them all around.
Is this the right tool to solve this problem?
If the problem is that search provides irrelevant results as there are more and more old questions for the search tool to dig through, why delete questions that could have been returned rather than filter results for recency? Or even using this exact same filter in search?
It makes sense that questions become less relevant or useful as they age- but even if we assume that is true, that doesn't mean deletion is the best means to fix a problem with search. Deletion seems like it should solve problems with low quality questions- and it sounds like the deletion pass for 30 day old questions does that already.
And, so it isn't left as subtext, I primarily find my way to existing questions by googling my question... and as far as I can tell, it weights recency just fine for questions that need it.
