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Here on meta, sometimes issues arise, and then arise again later as circumstances change. Is it appropriate, in such a situation, to close older questions about a topic as duplicates of a newer question about the same topic, if we want to direct current discussion of the topic to the newer question?

The specific situation I have in mind is the issue of whether or not we should continue allowing new questions about EoL releases. That's been discussed here and here, and now it's being discussed here. Can we make the older questions duplicates of the new one?

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I actually prefer this method of closing old question, it's been a policy between moderators for sometime. Ideally it's not the age of the question that matters, it's the quality. The higher quality question should always be the "master" that all others are closed as a duplicate of. What actions typically happen is, if the answers are still good on an older duplicate, but the newer duplicate has a better "canonical" question setup the answers will be migrated from the old question to the new one.

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  • Is this done even on main, then?
    – Eliah Kagan
    Commented May 26, 2012 at 20:23
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    I and other users have been known to do this.
    – Marco Ceppi Mod
    Commented May 26, 2012 at 21:11
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I don't think they should be closed. Re-opening the topic for discussion is okay, but I might put the older link references in the new question.

I would also solve search ranking with question upvotes. If the site is growing, it should be possible for there to be more voters to just fix search result ranking.

Something to remember is our user volume is changing, AU is on the installation media and main website now, and I think AU is trying to target newer users as opposed to long maintenance users.

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