[lucb1e]

General agree with the "mark obsolete" button, but I don't think the comment should be optional. If it's optional, you could mark anything as obsolete and you shift the burden of proof to the author (who may be long gone) or some community member to jump in, which sounds ripe for abuse to me. Rather, you should add why this is no longer current and let people with enough rep points verify it, similar to how editing someone else's post goes into an edit queue if you don't have enough reputation.

Might be relevant to mention that I'm quite active on the security stackexchange and regularly review the suggested edits queue (we don't have a constant backlog like stackoverflow does). Feel free to point out if you think this is not a nail for my hammer.

[hinkley]

Sometimes people get stuck on an old version of a tool chain. For them, stackoverflow may be the last option they have because Google only ranks links for the new versions.

“Obsolete” isn’t a flag, it’s a version number, or even a range. This solution doesn’t work with 3.0. This one is deprecated in 3.5.

But since semver is neither universal nor infallible, you’d have to actually model languages and libraries, with a curated list of version numbers. Which is awkward when you built your entire categorization system on tagging with strings instead of modeling problem domains.

[jrumbut]

I think for obsolete, you should give a link to the updated version rather than a comment (like duplicate is today) or it could be a vote that is balanced among other signals rather than a cause for deletion or deep archiving (since obsolete systems maintainers need help too).

I tend to think the real problem is the overly strict conception of duplicate. Over time, the way people will ask a question and the way people will answer it changes.

5-10 years ago almost every JS question was a jQuery question too, now not so much. As someone who lived through that I can very easily translate to the less jQuery-centric present, but someone who started learning JS/React last week can't. A new rendition of such a question/answer would be a duplicate for me, but the old one would be obsolete to the new developer.

I think the best way forward is that both duplicate and obsolete should be soft signals rather than reasons for closing.

[crispyambulance]

> I tend to think the real problem is the overly strict conception of duplicate.

It's true, people are so damn trigger-happy marking questions as duplicates.

I've seen new, well-posed questions on up-to-date frameworks get marked as dupe because 10 years ago someone asked a related question on an obsolete tech. The reason it was marked as dupe was simply because someone took it upon themselves to write up a sprawling smug "canonical" answer to a shitty old question that happened to cover the new subject matter.

It's much better to keep the old questions and answers, to just answer each question (and no more), and to create new questions as needed. Why not? it's not like they're running out of disk space.

I think the solution here is to encourage specific answers to specific questions, let folks sort out the historical minutiae based on timestamps and subject. Anything more elaborate is asking for mix-ups and confusion.

[misnome]

> The reason it was marked as dupe was simply because someone took it upon themselves to write up a sprawling smug "canonical" answer to a shitty old question that happened to cover the new subject matter.

This seems an optimistic view. What feels an awful lot of the time it just has some of the same outside appearances, and is a different question completely, but the people marking it as dupe don’t read it carefully enough, or don’t know enough about the subject to realise the differences.

[jrumbut]

I will say, compared to the past, it's gotten better. They seem more likely to let a good effort possible duplicate go now.

Still, it is my quixotic StackOverflow crusade and there remains more to do.

[lucb1e]

> I tend to think the real problem is the overly strict conception of duplicate.

I see where you're coming from, but having identical questions exist alongside each other just because their dates are different does not help those who follow a link to the older question. A new mechanism to indicate different versions would have to be added for this not to be confusing, if this is the solution we want to go with.

[jrumbut]

The idea is that soft obsolete/duplicate is used to make one side of the link more visible and the other side less visible. It definitely requires the addition of a new mechanism, or at least an adaptation of existing mechanisms.

When you search how to solve the hypothetical JavaScript problem I mentioned, the classic highly upvoted jQuery version of the question is up top, but if you can't see how that addresses your issue you can keep digging (or keep asking) for a version that makes sense to you.

Spammy, low effort, almost character for character duplicates can still be removed. I certainly acknowledge that the line is not always easy to define, but I think giving the reader what they probably want fast and then letting them sort through the long tail if needed is the approach better suited to programmer Q&A where the ability/background range is huge and database searching skills are above average.