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I have been reading as many questions as I could here on meta about flagging old questions but none of them seem to directly address this issue. In my travels through the corner of Stack Overflow I'm most interested in, I've come across more than a few questions that relate to older versions of Xcode, such as questions about upgrading, compatibility, or things that are specific to those older versions. This content is unlikely to be of much use to people in the future, especially in cases where the advice would actually be counter-productive with the current version of the software.

I've flagged a few key examples, but it made me wonder about doing a targeted search to find similar examples, which might lead me to flagging in one sweep 20-40 such examples that met this criteria, rather than one or two. Is systematically going looking for out of date content and flagging it desirable behaviour, or does this just fill up moderator queues with more work than needed?

For background, I've just crossed the 1k rep mark so can't vote to close. My flag weight is 562 from 52 flags so I'm confident the general quality of my flagging has been fine.

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    There's still people using MSVC6 (or even 5) - is that really not the case for xcode?
    – Flexo
    Nov 13, 2011 at 20:03
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    SO still recieves questions, almost daily, about how to do something in Xcode 3.x.y (current is 4.2). I wouldn't burn a history book just because the events aren't occuring today.
    – chown
    Nov 14, 2011 at 2:51
  • As much as I would love to live in a word where no one uses COBOL and requires IE 5.2 compatibility, it's not the one we have.
    – Ben Brocka
    Nov 14, 2011 at 2:55

1 Answer 1

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You cannot assume everyone will be using the latest version of the software. If the version information is relevant and not there, it should be added. Further, if the problem was fixed in subsequent versions, an addendum or comment noting that might be appropriate.

In actual practice, a question becoming completely irrelevant is probably somewhat rare. It's better to keep the question relevant by updating the information. If you feel you've discovered some mass problem needing a cleanup, it is probably better to start a meta post to call the community into action. Flagging incorrect information for moderator attention should probably be a last resort because the community should use their edit/voting/closing abilities to keep the content up to date, not the moderators.

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    +1 for editing voting and closing... We've got the tools to fix things without dragging moderators in
    – Simon Sheehan
    Nov 14, 2011 at 2:47

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