[abathur]

I think that would be a step in the right direction, but it may not help users arriving by search engine. I can imagine 3 things that might help:

1. Add an age-weighted score (and maybe sort by it) to make it easier to distinguish between an obsolete answer with hundreds of old upvotes and a recent answer with 10 recent upvotes.

2. Similar to above, but add an extra vote lever and visible score (perhaps conditionally, to older questions that stop getting upvoted?) for marking that an answer didn't work for you, or that you suspect it is obsolete, without having to downvote an answer that was given in good faith and worked for some time (and may still work for older versions/environments).

3. Add an option to open a superseding question (perhaps conditionally based on changes in absolute or age-weighted scores; perhaps it must be "community" owned but gets to inherit question upvotes) that has a special relationship with the original question and triggers extra UI on each side (to cross-link the questions, encourage users to directly mark which answers from the original work, and to provide feedback that affects when/whether the superseding question is treated as the canonical version).