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I see a lot of questions in the review queue that meet the following criteria.

  • They have one or more close votes/flags with reason off-topic EOL.
  • They have been asked long ago, and at the time of asking, the release in question was still supported.

I believe closing them as off-topic EOL is not correct, and that reason should be used only on questions that have been asked after the release reached its end of life.

What is the community opinion on this?

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  • How is this a duplicate?
    – Seth Mod
    Commented Jul 3, 2014 at 13:02
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    @Braiam, both the questions are about EOL, but I think the similarity ends there. You might notice that I am advocating against closing old questions if no better reason than EOL can be given, which is almost polar opposite of the intent of other question's OP.
    – Mahesh
    Commented Jul 3, 2014 at 15:35
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    They are just related as a lot of discussion took place about it in that question - as in order to advocate a EOL closing script you have to consider if every question tagged or mentioning a EOL release was to be closed. So not a duplicate but a question to reference
    – Mateo
    Commented Jul 3, 2014 at 16:25
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    According to What to do with out of date question with no answer? old questions should be closed, quote "I usually do offtopic -> Can't be reproduced/relevant for only a specific period of time.. I don't think the flag reason will matter, it's either EOL or it's obviously abandoned"
    – bain
    Commented Jul 6, 2014 at 0:00
  • Thanks everyone for your opinion. I prefer to use too localized as reason for unattended old questions. In principle, the community seems to have a consensus that they must be closed.
    – Mahesh
    Commented Jul 6, 2014 at 17:15
  • @Mahesh actually I was advocating closing old Unanswered questions via script. Your question doesn't specify. Fortunately Oli's excellent answer does
    – Elder Geek
    Commented Jul 9, 2014 at 21:41

1 Answer 1

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First and foremost any EOL question considered "answered" (has one or many +1 or higher answers, regardless of accepted) should be ignored. If you have to vote, I'd vote to leave-open. It's been dealt with, stop wasting review time.

I'd frankly take the same tack with unanswered questions. Unless they're a high scoring question they'll be cleared away automatically. If they are a high ranked question:

  • If the question would technically still apply, you could edit out the version specificity.
  • If the OP hasn't answered questions you could vote as unclear.
  • If it has a good answer that hasn't got a vote, +1 it and move on.
  • If it's super-version-specific and has no positive answers, close-EOL it.

But in all seriousness, almost any time spent on old questions is wasted time. We have questions coming in that aren't being dealt with so people would do best to hang out on the new questions page. The system will deal with the ancient cruft in its own time.

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    'considered "answered"' doesn't mean that you are going to leave a crappy question with a crappy answer either.
    – Braiam
    Commented Jul 3, 2014 at 12:52
  • If the system is efficient at deleting old questions automatically, then why are there still tens of thousands of junk old questions around? Zombie graph. Something is failing. "time spent on old questions is wasted time" - this is why old questions should be removed - if the questions are left open, then it is much more likely that someone will waste their time answering them (this often happens when an old question appears in the "new activity" queue and people do not realise it is old).
    – bain
    Commented Jul 5, 2014 at 23:09
  • @bain What's that graph's definition of a zombie?
    – Oli Mod
    Commented Jul 5, 2014 at 23:13
  • See this answer to Unanswered questions - what to do?
    – bain
    Commented Jul 5, 2014 at 23:15
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    @bain It's pretty late here and my eyes are drying out but I'm fairly sure this is explained away by us getting thousands of new questions each month, at an accelerating pace. So there are two things happening that lead to a total increase of "zombies": faster incoming and a nearer-constant ability to deal with questions. And that is why I'm suggesting people spend time on things before they become old rather than wasting their time reviewing old stuff. There's no point dealing with the older zombies if we're just making more by neglecting new questions.
    – Oli Mod
    Commented Jul 5, 2014 at 23:57
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    In other words, the graph shows that there are 3000-5000 new questions slipping through the net every month. We should only worry about what happened last year when we've fixed that problem.
    – Oli Mod
    Commented Jul 6, 2014 at 0:00
  • Obviously more help is required....... We need to be able to process another 100 - 200 questions per day.
    – Elder Geek
    Commented Jul 9, 2014 at 21:36

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