Old posts and answers need protection?

Question

As member of SU for more than 5 years, I have quite a number of old answers lying around. Some of them are so old and outdated that today they are just ridiculous, such as recommending the installation of SP2 for XP.

Because of these old answers, I am experiencing a slow trickle of down-votes. Although the total reputation lose is insignificant, this is still extremely irritating. It also seems that voting causes the post to go up in the list of answers, because one such down-vote may bring one or two more in succession.

In self-protection I have taken to deleting any old answer that gets a down-vote, but this is only an after-the-fact reaction, and it may penalize persons looking for a solution for an old computer.

The question of what to do with old posts and answers has been debated here several times.
For example:

• How to vote on old/dated answers to a question with a now incorrect accepted answer
• What is the correct way to deal with obsolete answers?
• What to do about permanently outdated questions/answers on SU

Most of the answers assume a thoughtful voting attitude, which is apparently not the general rule.

Therefore I raise the question of how to protect old posts and answers from thoughtless down-vote. "Old-timers" on this site since several years should not, in my opinion, be penalized for their past answers. This problem will certainly only become more and more acute with time.

Some protection mechanisms I can imagine are :

1. A warning for when a down-vote is attempted on an old answer, along the line of:
   "This is an old answer and so may not relate to current technology. Please do not down-vote answers that still pertain to computers running an older version of Operating System. Are you sure you want to down-vote this answer?"

2. Simply disallow down-votes for posts/answers older than x years.

3. Automatically post an informative message on posts/answers older than x years, warning that it may pertain to older technology and should not be accessed except for older computers.
   Microsoft, for example, already posts such warnings on older Knowledge Base articles.

Any such mechanism will also launch a debate of what is the age of a post/answer that is to be called "old". I would vote for 3 years, since technology moves quite fast.

Summary

This post has produced much spirited discussion, so I have achieved my main goal.

From the above three proposed options, it seems that the first one is relatively the most acceptable, the second is mostly unacceptable, and the third seems like too much noise added to posts and answers.

An idea proposed by @Duncan was to add an "Obsolete" tag to posts/answers, maybe voted upon by the community. Another one by @Abraxas, proposed requiring a mandatory commented reason for downvoting an old post/answer.

A constructive idea for a partial solution for my personal problem came from @Chenmunka, which is that rather than deleting such posts or answers, to convert them instead to Community Wiki to protect them from further downvotes.

It may yet take some years for people to feel that the problem needs addressing, and I agree that at the moment there is no urgency.

EDIT : We have all forgotten one solution : Education.
Before posting this I was getting 1-2 such downvotes per week. But since, there are none. This post seems to have unexpectedly solved my problem (for now).

Conclusion: The Help Center should explain better when down-voting is not appropriate.

Answer 1

If you want to retain the reputation previously earned and, after all, you did earn it, then making the answer Community Wiki would protect it and the answer would remain for posterity.

Wouldn't that be the simplest way? Especially if a caveat were added to the answer stating that it may no longer be applicable to new systems.

Answer 2

I've occasionally noticed, and commented on and downvoted lower quality, link-only answers, and you've definitely got a lot of rep - and well, if I thought one of your answers wasn't good, I'd consider downvoting and commenting. Not everyone might do the latter. In your case these would be link-only answers, with some older, bountied questions if I recall correctly.

To put it mildly, there isn't really a problem IMO.

The proper way to deal with this, in my opinion is rather than protecting older questions from downvotes, is for answers to be updated as you notice they are downvoted. This has a few advantages - it gets better visibility for the question, and if your answer is fantastic, people would upvote it anyway.

Answer 3

Making any change without knowing the intention of the downvoter seems pointless. Maybe they just downvoted you because they don't like you simply for being the user with the most reputation on the site.

I also get downvotes all the time on different sites, it doesn't bother me at all and I never even had the thought that this needs to be prevented.

Who cares if it's an old question? People might have to mess with some legacy system in a company at some point and might think the answer is helpful. Or they're setting up a VM for research reasons. The fact that you would delete a possibly helpful answer just because it earned you a single downvote is just sad.

Answer 4

I agree that old technology should not be a basis for downvoting. The Meta discussions you linked to focus on obsolete information, and that is one source of the problem. But I have a different take on a more prevalent cause of the phenomenon.

You mention one downvote leading to more. Voting doesn't affect movement to the active questions list, so random successive downvotes on an old post are unlikely. Most of the cases I've seen were because someone had contributed a new answer, or a spammer searched for a suitable question to use as an excuse to post an answer. That pushes the question into the active list, where it gets rediscovered. There are also many cases of someone discovering an old question or answer and editing it to improve or update it. That similarly bumps the question.

I have not seen any questions or answers downvoted solely on the basis of being about old technology, or correctness that may have changed over time (this just reflects relative prevalence). But I have seen many old questios, and answers, downvoted on the basis of site standards having changed over time. The issue you raise about protecting old posts applies to these, as well, and may be a more commonplace problem.

Maybe the biggest source of such delayed downvoting is software/hardware recommendations. These were commonplace many years ago, and still accepted even a few years ago. They've become more taboo in maybe the last year. I've seen many of these downvoted on that basis.

The community expectations for question and answer quality have also risen. Many of the very old questions and answers are lacking in quality by today's standards. I've seen many of these get recent downvotes on that basis after being reactivated by new activity.

Questions that are no longer on topic, like software recs, should be closed, and retained if they received useful answers, but downvoting long after they were considered acceptable is probably inappropriate. I could see a warning, like your suggestion #1, being expanded to include changing site standards as well as technology age.

Questions, and answers, that are simply low quality can be improved, and an argument can be made that there should not be a time limit on that. However, old posts that were originally considered acceptable might be candidates for protection like "conditional" downvotes (downvotes that trigger a notice to the voter if the post is edited so the downvote can potentially be retracted and not permanently prejudice the post).

Answer 5

Surely some sort of optional label like "obsolete" would be applicable to show that the answer was good and relevant at the time of posting but may not be now. Down-voting makes no sense as

1. the answer is still likely to have high(ish) marks and may be accepted
2. the answer may be the most correct answer to a question which may itself be out-of-date (in this case indicating that the entire question is obsolete, but not necessarily a bad question, would be useful, surely?)
3. in isolation provides no useful data to visitors

Answer 6

Would considering a system which required a commented reason 'why' (even if limited in visibility) on downvotes to answers over whatever age (3 years, 5 years, etc) be a potential fix? Or maybe only the 'first' downvote after that time?