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Questions that are specific to deprecated behavior--for instance, how an HTML rendering method works for an old version of Ruby on Rails--should be tagged as outdated, or specific to older versions. Is there a way to do this?

I realize I've found several questions that are 2-3 years old while looking up how to do something. While it's not annoying, I and others could save a lot of time if there were tags such as "Ruby-on-Rails<=2" that we could filter out (or include if a search doesn't yield any satisfying results)

Edit: When I find old information on Rails, much of what I is still relevant to the current version.

It would be nice to add a tag like deprecated-as-of-rails-2. That way, when (popular) questions/answers become inaccurate, they will be eventually tagged as such. Information on old versions is still useful to people maintaining/upgrading legacy code, but this should be distinguished from newer code when incompatible.

Should this be a feature request? Could it just be adopted by the community using a specific convention on tags?

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    Most tags have versions (ios-5.0, ios-4.0, etc). I do wish more people would use tags that had a specific version (python); that would make this not an issue if proper tags were used.
    – chown
    Oct 18, 2011 at 2:29
  • @chown yeah, I'm subscribed to the ruby-on-rails-3 tag. I decided to clarify my point a bit, thanks for pointing that out
    – Eric Hu
    Oct 18, 2011 at 3:23
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    @chown The vast majority of questions tagged python-2.6 or python-2.7 etc. actually have nothing to do with that version of Python. For many of them there was nothing about the question specific to even python-3.x or python-2.x. I think the tag should only be that specific if it actually refers to features introduced in or removed after a certain version. If it isn't known yet that a feature will be removed in ios-6.0 and it's been around for several versions, does it make sense to tag ios-5.0? (The version used should still be mentioned in the question).
    – agf
    Oct 18, 2011 at 4:35

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There already is a tag. Please don't create any new tags, just use that one.

If we need more specific version tags to delineate different software versions, then they should be created as needed.

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    Using the tag this way would make it a meta tag (about the post itself, not about the content). I don't think that's how people are currently using the tag; they are using it to refer to software versions and features that are obsolete.
    – user102937
    Oct 18, 2011 at 4:52
  • Yes, I agree, but I think it's all about perspective. If they ask a question on an already deprecrated feature, then they can tag it deprecated and with the version tag that it was ok with, whereas this question seems to refer to going back to old questions that are now known to be deprecated where they weren't before, so then they can now be tagged deprecated and with the relevant version tag. I don't think it's a meta tag, since the content is actually deprecated, but whether somthing is a meta tag is pretty subjective.
    – Lance Roberts
    Oct 18, 2011 at 13:56
  • What about situations in which the question could still be answered for the current version of a language? Should a question be marked as deprecated just because the answers are? We could downvote answers with deprecated information, but should the poster of that question really lose reputation for not keeping his answers up-to-date? (Or perhaps I'm wrong and SO limits reputation loss from posts after a period of time)
    – Eric Hu
    Oct 18, 2011 at 18:03
  • @Eric, I would probably just help the answerer out, and edit in that this implementation method was deprecated. Just some text in the answer.
    – Lance Roberts
    Oct 18, 2011 at 18:08

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