What I would like to propose is a system where posts that have not received any answers will be removed after a certain period of time to help clean up the amount of old empty posts cluttering the search results.

So this is actually something which we have discussed previously, and are generally positive towards! Once a thread archives after 6 months, nothing more can be added to it, answer-wise, so an unanswered question in the archives just helps screw up search results.

To be sure, there are drawbacks, as there is value in seeing all the old questions answered or not, but a process that does this presumably could spit out a record of the archived threads removed, which could be saved for record keeping purposes.

The main issue is that this isn't something that can be done using Automod, and to do it manually would, to say the least, be a complete and utter nightmare. As you hint at, it would require a custom bot to be scripted and be run, and we would have a few requirements for how it would be done. Removal of zero comment threads, or one comment where it is only the Automod sticky, is easy enough, but to be effective, recognizing when there are visible comments versus only removed comments would be at least a bit tougher.

Still though, the main point is that this is absolutely an idea that we have have discussed in the past, and it isn't a bad one either. If you, or someone reading this, is handy with scripting Reddit bots, please do reach out to us and we'd be thrilled to discuss it further.

For what it's worth, old questions do get answered sometimes. I've seen questions get an answer well over a month after being posted, much to the submitters' surprise. Even posts that are 6+ months old and have since been archived: I've written a reply 15 months after the question was submitted; the longest I'm aware of is 18 months later. The downside to this of course is that since the thread is archived, we have to make a new thread, and as far as I'm aware there's no way of updating the original post to link to the new post to show that it has been answered post-archive (do mods have the ability to comment on archived posts?). I believe that people can edit posts and comments even when a thread is archived, so it is feasible for the submitter to edit their post to include a link to the response, but I'm not sure how moderators would feel about allowing that.

I think there's value in keeping up old posts, since it gives weirdos people like me the chance to scroll through what people have wondered about but never got an answer to, and finally deliver that to them. On the flipside, though, I totally know the frustration of digging through old posts when looking for answers and just seeing a list of unanswered posts, especially when I'm searching through Google and I'm unable to know if the question has been answered before opening the link.

Been saying this forever. It's cool seeing a topic only for it to be a ghost town in the comment section. Like damn just remove the post since it's been up for a while.

A slightly modified solution might be for all unanswered questions over (say) 1 year old to have their titles/contents/original asker collected into a master list, saved on the sub's wiki, and the posts themselves deleted.

If a wise contributor here wants to come along and answer a long-unanswered question from the master list, maybe we can introduce a post flair ("Answered at last!") to indicate that the contributor is creating a new post to answer an old unanswered one.

Considering that in this thread there have been offers to make a bot for this.

Might it be a good idea to bring unanswered question back to the top so they get the attention of visitors of this sub again? If you do that you might get more answered questions. Also, after two renewals you could remove them. Kind of 'three strikes you're out' system.

One problem with deleting old threads that aren't answered here is that some of them, after not receiving answers here, were cross-posted to other subreddits where they did end up receiving answers. Deleting those threads here could end up causing readability issues with those threads in other subreddits.

The reason there are no answers is because every comment is deleted. This is by far the worst moderated reddit. It's a shame that the ivory tower dwellers here don't allow anything other than certified "experts" to even comment.

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So the rest of us don't even bother to click the topic, we know there won't be any answers, and if we put any effort in whatsoever, everything will be deleted immediately.