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As a young site we haven't had this problem much yet but in a fast moving world, things change quickly and what were once very good answers can become out of date. Due to our prominence in the search engines, it could be possibly harmful to leave outdated answers as they are. This is already a problem with people getting information from old blog posts and forum threads.

However, we have wiki style editing on our side so we can update answers as they become out of date or at least make it obvious that they are for a particular Ubuntu version.

What are the best practices for dealing with such situations?

2 Answers 2

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I am finding that for more popular questions (the ones bringing in new users with Me toos! and the popular question badges) the bump mentally reminds me that people are reading those often so I tend to pay attention more when they get bumped and I tend to give them a once over. (I check the popular question and answer badges since I am interested in what questions people read often)

What I've been doing personally is

  • making sure that I'm tagging questions with a version as often as it makes sense, basically any desktopish GUI related question because in 11.04 everything will be different.

  • Future proofing my answers so they won't be so out of date, usually in the form of not giving an answer but pointing to where that information might be available in the future.

  • Going through some of my older answers on a regular basis and seeing if they need to be updated. This likely won't scale forever, heh.

  • https://askubuntu.com/questions/greatest-hits are our 1000 post popular questions, they should be reviewed regularly!

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  • Okay, say there's a really good question for Ubuntu 11.10, then duplicate questions for Ubuntu 12.04 start being linked to that older question. The difference isn't huge, but it's a little ugly: users of 12.04 are being pointed to a resource with old screenshots. Is it reasonable to change that older question so it's referring to 12.04 (and update the answer to have new screenshots), or should we have a new answer for 12.04?
    – Dylan McCall
    Commented Jul 11, 2012 at 2:07
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    Post a new answer for 12.04.
    – Jorge Castro
    Commented Jul 11, 2012 at 2:08
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Jorge Castro already posted an excellent answer above. Here are my suggestions:

  • Edit, edit and edit.
  • Add a new answer / update existing answer for currently supported releases.
  • Update screenshots.
  • Flag invalid answers.

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