I love scrolling through the questions and answering and helping with as many as I can, but sometimes I'll run into a really old question. By really old I mean anywhere from 2-3 years old. What my question is, is why does the system keep these questions circulated. Most are un-answered, but after 2 years, someone will probably have figured out how to solve a problem, and most likely it will have been on a system which is way past its End-Of-Life date. I get that the system tries to circulate questions, but that seems kind of pointless.
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4The system wasn't designed with Ubuntu problems in mind... and some will still be answerable.– Seth ModCommented Jan 28, 2016 at 21:17
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1There's even a badge for it!– Seth ModCommented Jan 28, 2016 at 21:18
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@Seth Interesting– DavidCommented Jan 28, 2016 at 21:20
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3 Answers
If you think that a question is no longer useful to anyone (the OS is way past EOL, and/or the question is unclear and the OP vanished years ago), you may want to downvote it. "Not useful" is one of reasons to downvote something. Questions with a negative score are not bumped by Community bot.
This is by design, sometimes the system bumps older questions up for attention, as an answer hasn't been selected, and it may need newer viewpoints to get answered. This is mainly due to the fact the SE system was not designed with Ubuntu problems in mind, and some questions can still be answerable even today.
There's a badge, as well, for this, where you answer with a good answer at least 60 days after the fact, and that's the Necromancer badge. There's, unfortunately, nothing we can do about this, as it's a by-design feature embedded into the system.
answered Jan 28, 2016 at 21:52
The first thing I'd do would be to try to find an answered duplicate and flag it for closure / vote to close it against it.
If there's no duplicate to close it against and you're sure the question is not still relevant and potentially useful and / or unclear, then this close reason applies:
This describes a problem that can't be reproduced that seemingly went away on its own or was only relevant to a very specific period of time. It's off-topic an unlikely to help future readers.
Which after 2 years of the question being unanswered it's probably a safe bet.
Closed questions won't be bumped up by Community♦.
