> it still holds years worth of answers that were just fine a few years ago - so why aren't they showing up now?
Are they just fine today, too? To judge that, you have to look at the date of the question and its answers, make an educated guess at what OS/language/library versions they are about, judge whether that makes a difference for the version(s) you’re using, and only then evaluate whether the reply even was correct at the time (it may have had a thousand upvotes, but still be dated)
I think a really good Q/A resource would require posts to be tagged with version info. Most people think manual tagging isn’t fun, though, so it’s hard to get such a set from volunteers.
An alternative would be to require test cases that the site can run to check what version(s) replies are valid for, but writing such tests that do not break over time is hard, and, again, in general volunteers don’t like writing them.
That leaves generating tags or test cases. I don’t think we’re there, quality wise, to do that.
Are they just fine today, too? To judge that, you have to look at the date of the question and its answers, make an educated guess at what OS/language/library versions they are about, judge whether that makes a difference for the version(s) you’re using, and only then evaluate whether the reply even was correct at the time (it may have had a thousand upvotes, but still be dated)
I think a really good Q/A resource would require posts to be tagged with version info. Most people think manual tagging isn’t fun, though, so it’s hard to get such a set from volunteers.
An alternative would be to require test cases that the site can run to check what version(s) replies are valid for, but writing such tests that do not break over time is hard, and, again, in general volunteers don’t like writing them.
That leaves generating tags or test cases. I don’t think we’re there, quality wise, to do that.