A note on flagging end of life questions

Question

Recently in review, there seems to be a lot of questions flagged for end of life, the issue with these flags is that when the questions were written they were ON TOPIC, this is important, old questions are not removed once a release goes EOL.

Please, please, please read the date a question was posted BEFORE you flag it as end of life, if it was on topic when it was asked it is still on topic now, context is very important here.

See this example, it was written on Feb 5 '12 at 13:25 and is about 11.10 so it is on topic in the context of when it was written, so it stays and should not be flagged.

Sorry if this seem a bit of a rant but is is very frustrating to have to review these flags when the information is right there on the page, just look above the posters user name, thanks.

Answer 1

Good reminder, Mark.

The question in question here however ended up in the review queue because somebody directly close-voted it as:

off-topic → 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 as it's unlikely to help future readers.

I won't name them here but they're weren't otherwise involved in the review. I find this approach fairly tedious and incredibly labour-intensive for something that wasn't bothering anybody else. Just leave old stuff alone*. There will simply always be too many old posts to handle it like this.

But maybe they had a reason. I'll poke them towards this thread if they haven't already seen it and if they want to leave a reply, they can.

_{* Unless you want to improve it and make it apply to new situations, which we're more than happy for people to do!}

Answer 2

So, I was mailed about this. I'm not happy. In fact, I knew it wasn't anything good.

I was the one that voted to close that question as not reproducible, and I would do it again. The question has been asked 3 years ago, it isn't viewed by anyone (which is a metric some people love to use), and the answer is another regurgitation of "buy a better system or use something more light" which we don't lack.

These kind of Q&A's aren't useful since it drops the general quality of the site and, since we are in the process of burning the freeze tag, I took up the task. This tag needs to be removed someday, we discussed this several occasions. I'm more mindful about the inaction around this kind of issues, since the freeze reduce the visibility of questions, as is normally the only tag used or used with other problematic tags (like crash) that is like shooting ourself in the foot.

Everything has been done while being mindful of Shog's "When to burninate" guidance, specifically the "Start by cleaning up the edges" section, since the other procedure has already been completed.

This is not me mindlessly voting to close questions I don't like. You can check my review history and you will find some examples that I redeemed of questions badly tagged. I would ask instead turn this meta post in a plea for help, since when I hinted of my actions hopping a good kind soul would take up the challenge with me, nobody offered a hand, and I even found evidence of people going against this, since closing as duplicated wouldn't help to remove the tag.

I'm not even sure why the reviewers through it was EOL, and I'm kind of disappointed because I always have said "remove the references to the version of Ubuntu" to evaluate if a question is factually EOL. I'm not sure of the others EOL questions that you might be seeing. It would help if you show more examples to help you with your issue.