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The site policy suggests that neither salutations nor thanks are needed in questions. Opinion is divided on this. On a language site I think the issues are slightly different from a scientific site. Recently I was searching for possible duplicates before asking a question about "gracias" and this was made much harder because most of the 300+ hits were questions just thanking in advance. I propose therefore to go through them and edit out the superfluous "gracias". I do not want to flood the front page though so my question is how many the community would think it reasonable to have on the front page at one time. To make it easier to respond I will give some answers with possible numbers so you can vote for your preferred choice.

If the question is in Spanish I suppose I should give the edit reason in Spanish too. I was thinking of "Gracias borrada por que resulta difícil la busqueda de preguntas sobre la palabra gracias" but would welcome corrections.

============== update after seeing comments and answers ==============

It looks like the front page usually has about five days worth of threads so to avoid over-loading it probably one or two a day is the maximum to do. I have deleted the specimen answers I provided and added a new one to collect more opinion.

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  • I'd suggest that you look for questions with "cortesía" as a tag. // In such a case, I think you can forget about worrying about whether it's a duplicate. Just go ahead and ask, and if someone with a good memory can find an old duplicate question, great, if not, it's not the end of the world. // I think five at a time (maybe twice per day?) might be good because then one can still see meaningful new activity by scrolling but without having to click to the next page. I'll wait to vote to see if any discussion affects my thinking.
    – aparente001
    Commented Mar 5, 2018 at 2:24
  • @aparente001 thank you for the hint about the [cortesia] tag about which I was ignorant.
    – mdewey
    Commented Mar 5, 2018 at 13:15
  • Regarding the edit reason: I think it's okay to give the edit reason in English. But your phrase works -- might be a little clearer and simpler like this: Borré "gracias" or Borré las gracias. Since that's part of the general SE editing guidance, I don't think a justification is actually needed.
    – aparente001
    Commented Mar 5, 2018 at 13:39

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The front page shows 50 questions, so 5-10 total bumped questions per day should be fine.
By total I mean all thanks-removing edits from all users combined.

This implies that users willing to engage in this kind of editing should probably coordinate so as to not have 3-4 users editing 5-10 posts each (resulting in 40 old posts coping the "active" ranking).
If such a coordination also managed to do the editing at off-peak hours, to avoid pushing the newest questions out of the top, that'd be great too.

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  • What are the off-peak hours? I've noticed activity is low on the weekend. So maybe the weekend isn't such a good time for bulk editing -- to make it easier for people to catch up on recent meaningful activity when they check in on Monday morning?
    – aparente001
    Commented Mar 5, 2018 at 13:34
  • About the coordination -- would it be good enough to check the recent activity roll before starting, and also at the mid-point?
    – aparente001
    Commented Mar 5, 2018 at 13:35
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I think it is a good idea, but only if you use the bump to also do some of these other things: clarify answers, improve tagging, vote the posts, flag obsolete comments... I don't think it is necessary to bump a lot of questions just to delete acknowledgements. I am the first to be in favour of removing those, but bumping a post just for this seems unnecessary to me.

Your problem here was that you wanted to find a post about "gracias". As aparente001 said:

I'd suggest that you look for questions with "cortesía" as a tag.

The search engine we have here is not outstanding, but it gets severely better if you use tags to filter the results. For this, I think your question is a great example to show that we have to improve the tagging.

We are a small community in which the daily dose of news to check is normally within the first 15 posts in the main page. From time to time, people bump things by editing in order to add new tags or clearly modify posts. I think it is fine! And I encourage so, taking into consideration what I said above: use those to make a better site, have better titles, make things easier to find and answers better for newcomers.

There are some proposals I tend to take into consideration when visiting old questions:

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One or two per day should be the maximum.

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