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I'm not a moderator, just a regular user of Stack Exchange.

A number of times, I've composed questions on SE or searched for questions and answers that solve problems I've had and found that all or most of the answers were very old, sometimes 10 years or more. Given that these are typically technical questions in areas like HTML or CSS which have often evolved in leaps and bounds over the years, I am less than confident that I'm seeing the best answers to these questions. I often expect there are new and better solutions to the problems that what was done a decade or more in the past.

What should I be doing in those cases? I'm concerned that if I ask the question again, it might just be treated as a duplicate question and get pointed to answers that may well be far from optimum. Would anyone see followup questions like "Is this still the best approach now that considerable time has passed?" if I added them as comments to the original question?

I can't believe this is a new issue or question. There must be a standard approach to this; I'm just not sure what it is.

P.S. I'm sorry if this is tagged inappropriately; this is my first time in Meta and I'm not sure how it operates.

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2 Answers 2

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Different sites might be more or less lenient to you creating a near duplicate question, but one thing that will work on any site is that if you think that the existing answers are outdated, you can start a bounty with the reason "Answers are outdated"

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Well technology does change over time.

Often you can just get away with a new/updated answer referencing how the older answers reflect an old situation and have changed.

Sometimes, you can differentiate - say by including new versions of the technology and referencing the original question and building a new question from there. Make it clear you get the old question, and what the needs are that dosen't quite meet.

With things like HTML - there's HTML 4 and 5, and I believe CSS is versioned too.

So talk about what you understand of the old question, and how/what you want to achieve that could have changed. Maybe include the fact you want to use new features in a specific version of the technology or platform and so on.

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