Can we mark some threads as outdated?

O

ondra_knezour

Some information may not be relevant any more after some time. What about implementing "outdated" prefix in similar fasion as "solved" one? And maybe even generate robots.txt forbidding indexing such threads?

Context
 
I tend to agree with eternal_noob. The first thing I look at when sifting through the many threads on a subject is the date posted. But, still have found a few nuggets in some of those "old" threads.
 
rpowell47 said:
But, still have found a few nuggets in some of those "old" threads.
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Yes, and that's why tagging the threads would be counterproductive.

Even if the main question has old/invalid answers, there might be other useful information in there worth reading.
An "outdated" tag would prevent people from browsing those threads.

It's better to decide on your own whether you can make use of the information or not.
 
I should probably expressed myself better. Some threads deals with problems, which (probably) doesn't exists any more, see context in the first post. When such thread is discovered usually by accident, it may be marked as outdated even with short reason why it is such to inform newcomers from search engines that they didn't found the holy grail yet and should carry on. They don't have resources nor knowledge to spot it by themselves, otherwise they wouldn't have searched for it at first. Date isn't good indicator, about 20 years with FreeBSD and I still use ifconfig to set IP address :)
 
ondra_knezour said:
… Date isn't good indicator, …
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+1

Dating is essential. It's unfortunate that Klara Inc. can not, or will not, fix its articles.

Essential guidance, however the date does not define whether content is outdated. <https://old.reddit.com/comments/qm047h/-/hjmm573/> there's a good example of a 2012 page that I can refer to without hesitation.

Google Groups got things wrong, long ago, by automatically locking content. Particularly stupid, in that Google not only locked content, it then flagged things as duplicates (i.e. troublesome) when duplication of a topic was essential because the original topic was artificially locked. Like, Google caused trouble then punished authors for working around the trouble caused by Google. Fixed, I can't recall when, but by then I had learnt to not use Google Groups.

Reddit got things wrong by automatically preventing votes and additional comments after six months. Fixed!

… additional engagement also caused only a 0.3% increase in mod actions taken. We were excited to see that the increase in comments and votes did not correlate to a significant increase in mod actions taken. …
Click to expand...

This, for example, is why I'm frustrated by knee-jerk "necropost" reactions in response to very carefully chosen use of old topics. Old does not necessarily equal outdated, or worthless.
 
grahamperrin said:
the date does not define whether content is outdated.
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I agree, but if a thread has been started a decade ago, it might be a good indicator to take the information with a grain of salt.

It of course depends on the topic.
There are things that never change, e.g. basic commands like ls or things that change very often, e.g. questions about Gnome.
 
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