How does the Automatic Bumping System Work?

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Can we have some kind of explanation for how the Automatic Bumping system works, and possibly have someone take a look at it?

I’m asking because, while it’s not the only example of what I’m talking about, I’m looking at a policy about ‘free energy’ where there are three actual posts and then a string of seven automatic bumps.

Absolutely nobody has commented in that proposal since October 16th, yet in the past two and a half months or so it has been auto-bumped a number of times that is more than twice the actual activity it has received.

I’m not trying to single that proposal out specifically as a problem, but I’ve noticed other proposals as well that get automatically bumped for who knows what reason despite it being clear that nobody - not even the person who originally made the proposal - having anything new to say or caring to find something new to say.

At minimum, can we please have an explanation as to how Automatic Bumping works and maybe have someone behind the scene take a look at revising the Automatic Bumping system?

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Usually, bumps seem to occur once per month. I have no idea why that particular one got bumped 5 times in 17 days.

As for the why, I suspect it’s because the front page is stuffed with policies that had first-mover advantage back in October/November and gobbled up all the active users’ 40 votes. New proposals slide off in a matter of hours, so there needs to be some churn.

Personally, I’d like it if the mods got more proactive about merges so there would be more space for unique ideas on the front page.

There has to be a middle ground between just letting the site get clogged up like this and saying “someone asked a similar question 15 years ago (and got no answer), so I’m closing this topic, KYS” like stackexchange does.