31
The Necromancer badge certainly encourages posting answers to old questions:
Answered a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or more
When I come accross an answer with such a disclaimer, I edit it out. Just like I edit out greetings and similar fluff.
27
A refinement of the FAQ comments (this is why they're comments not actual FAQ questions/answers)...
It's one thing for someone to add their pronouns to a new post. If they volunteer them, we're asking that you leave them - for now. This is considered a temporary situation while we review our tools and see if there's a way we can easily support pronouns ...
26
Yes, "too old" is a good reason not to migrate. Old questions are of very low value, and when old questions go from SO (with the matching crazy high views/votes) they're very disruptive to smaller communities: piles of free rep and badges for the owners of the migrated posts, the question looks disproportionately good via upvotes, the tone of the question/...
24
There is nothing wrong if you want to improve your (and others') questions, I'd say it's even appreciated.
21
Yes, that's what comments are for.
Use comments to ask for clarification or add more information.
19
There are two badges that encourage answering old questions:
The Revival Badge: Answered more than 30 days later as first answer scoring 2 or more. This badge can be awarded multiple times.
The Necromancer Badge: Answered a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or more. This badge can be awarded multiple times.
I also asked this question when I ...
19
Is such behavior considered correct?
No, it isn't; it's utterly unacceptable. If you see behaviour like this, flag the user for moderation attention (they're not likely to stop if you leave a comment). The Help Center clearly states when it's appropriate to make an edit:
Tiny, trivial edits are discouraged - try to make the post significantly better when ...
17
Yes you should. It adds nothing to the answer. I believe answers should be as concise as possible.
No, there is nothing particularly wrong with answering old questions, as long as it adds something new to the discussion, such as stating that the current answers are obsolete (and why they are obsolete and an updated solution) or giving a new solution that ...
17
We appreciate it greatly when people take the time to answer old, forgotten questions, but there are a few things you can do to improve the chances of having your efforts rewarded.
Answer questions in popular tags. It looks like you're targeting the aiml tag from the examples you posted. That's fine if that's what you know, but it's a very low traffic tag (...
15
At which age or upvotes question becomes historical significant enough not to vote to close?
Never. If it's no longer an on-topic and good question for the site, vote to close it. That doesn't mean it needs to be deleted. It doesn't imply the OP is a terrible user who has no clue how to predict the future. All it says is "Such questions shouldn't be asked (...
14
If you've found a better solution than those provided and are using that better solution, then yes, post it as an answer and mark it as the accepted answer.
Stack Overflow is not a discussion forum. This is not a place for people to come and lazily talk about a solution. There is no need to summon prior participants*. By posting an answer, you will bump the ...
14
Absolutely!
If you would flag a 4-second-old post for an issue, there is no reason you shouldn't flag a 4-year-old post.
My reasoning is that both are indexed by Google - old posts don't get thrown down a black hole. If there are issues in a post, people will see them - and it reflects badly on the site. Therefore, these issues should be taken care of, ...
answered Aug 21 '13 at 21:40
Undo - Reinstate Monica
46.2k17 gold badges86 silver badges205 bronze badges
14
Is there no rule for grandfathering in early questions?
There is no such rule. When the standards change they are applied retroactively to all existing questions. Many such questions happen to go for long periods of time without being noticed, but if someone does notice them they are entirely within their rights to vote to close, or do whatever other ...
13
No, don't change old questions whole-sale, that would be a disservice to those who tried to help you answer them.
You are not doing too badly on Stack Overflow. Leave those old questions be; at most, if there are no upvoted answers, you could delete them.
13
I'm not sure it'll be appropriate to ask a new question, since I understand it'll be a duplicate.
Then make it not a duplicate. "How do I solve X?" is the current question, to which the answer is "Y". So you wanna ask, "How do I solve X when Y doesn't work?"
To be more specific, you'd want to describe in detail how the author's technique of prescaling ...
13
Why would someone want to answer a question that is old and has an accepted answer without bringing anything new and useful to the table?
The only good reason I can think of is that they think they are bringing something new and useful to the table. You might disagree, and they may be wrong in thinking that, but it's the only good reason to post an answer ...
12
For really old questions that are unlikely to get enough attention to receive 4 more close votes, flagging for moderator attention and requesting closure is probably the best approach.
Considering that most of the questions you'll be flagging as "off topic" or "not constructive" meet those criteria in ways that are painfully obvious, the moderator who ...
12
I just wanted to flesh out some of the ideas above and address some issues. These are for the user nominated system bounty idea.
To prevent abuse, you can't nominate your own question for a bounty.
You also can't answer a question you've nominated.
Nominating questions for a system bounty should be a 10K privilege or higher.
Users should have a very ...
12
Thank you for trying. In this instance, though, it doesn't appear like you're going to succeed.
Ask your question yourself. Include, if appropriate, the information requested by the previous commenter and try and come up with a better title (i.e. not just an error message).
If you do get an answer your question will be more useful than the one that came ...
answered Oct 22 '12 at 18:47
ben is uǝq backwards
36.7k13 gold badges77 silver badges168 bronze badges
11
The question will be added to the Suggested Edits review queue for anyone to review. It depends how many are currently in the queue to begin with, but it doesn't get assigned to any specific person, it just gets added to the list.
You can ask questions about questions here on Meta (that's one of the things Meta is for), but not on the main site. That site is ...
11
You can promote the answer from outside the site. For example, a blog entry can tell the story of how back in 2012 when [link] was asked, there really wasn't a good way to handle things. It can paraphrase the other answers and then -tada!- reveal the exciting new development that enables things to be better now. Folks who follow that link (you can link ...
10
Because some time ago the standards of what's acceptable for Stack Overflow and what's not changed—for the better. Open ended questions like this are no longer acceptable.
Unfortunately, people decided that this meant that old, extremely popular questions with good information needed to be purged and deleted. Supposedly these questions create "broken ...
10
"Too old to migrate" is now ingrained into the system. For example, this question can now not be migrated:
This also applies on main sites, and the restriction includes community ♦ moderators. Therefore with these changes it is no longer possible to migrate the question even if it is a valid request without developer intervention which may be likely to ...
10
Don't re-ask that question, it'll be closed as not constructive.
That question was asked in the relatively early days of Stack Overflow, before all the kinks had been worked out. One change between then and now is that questions asking about open-ended comparisons or pro/con lists are closed because there's not really any right answer.
Jeff wrote about ...
10
In the general case, even when your question is bad, the answers might be where the value is. So no, you should not be able to just delete it imo. Though you could flag for moderator attention and ask them to have a look. I can't say the specific question adds a whole lot to the site.
10
What you should do here is just flag the question for moderator attention and let them know what's going on. There are far more legitimate uses for the behavior to stay as is than edge cases where one can abuse it, so it makes much more sense to simply stop the person that's doing so.
There are checks in place to discourage people from bumping by editing ...
10
Instead of editing I would have left a comment to give the OP a chance to fix and/or add additional info.
Downvoting posts that are not (longer) correct is perfectly OK, that is where downvotes are for.
You would serve that question and the community better if you provide an answer to that question that would be correct today. Maybe the OP of the ...
10
The tooltip for downvoting an answer is:
This answer is not useful
If an answer is no longer useful then I think it should be downvoted even if it was useful at some earlier time.
Then, as commented by @PatrickHofman:
Downvoting might also encourage the author to update their answer.
and thereby encourage them to be re-upvoted (perhaps higher than ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
