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There are a few questions floating around from days gone by, a time when we weren't as structured, a time before tag crusades, before the purges and burninations, that just don't make sense in the current context of the site and site policy.

For example, the question: Make the [spoiler] tag ignored by default, even for anonymous users. We have since purged, burned and buried the tag.

What about Starcraft 2 'strategy' tag should actually many times be 'tactics', agree? Again, the question broadly speaks about two tags ( and ) which have since been purged.

Are these questions worth keeping? If so, should they be closed or locked?

In a broader sense, how should we deal with meta questions like these that have been rendered obsolete by some action?

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  • Are the questions worth spending effort to find and close/remove? Many will be helpful as history, if nothing else.
    – Matthew Read
    Jan 6, 2014 at 3:36
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    @MatthewRead - I'm not talking about expending effort to find them, I just happenned to stumble across these two whilst "Related Question Surfing", and I was wondering how do we action them, whether or not we should answer, close or lock them (and questions like them), so that future people that stumble across them know that they are obsolete. As I said on FEichinger's post, they may be obsolete at this point in time, but they may become relevant if we decide to reverse some of the other decisions made, so I don't think deletion is the way forward
    – Robotnik Mod
    Jan 6, 2014 at 5:36

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Meta Questions with , or (we could extend this to more tags (such as ), but primarily this is about the required tags) should, once handled, receive any of the mod-only status tags:

At that point, they are done. No further action on the question is necessary, and the timestamp on the edit tells us clearly just how likely the question is now irrelevant.
If we override such an old question's result at one point, we might also add a link to the previous questions, so they can be navigated.

This gets a little more complicated with . Discussions aren't meant to have a final result - but they're still "finished" at some point. Discussions are, however, also the most vital part of the site: This is where we determine site-policy, this is where we determine what action to take and when to take it. For that very reason, these questions need to stay.

A simple solution to this is to use the mod-only more. Add important information there, and let the other questions remain for reference. Perhaps, for implemented site policy, we could also implement a new tag such as or similar (since itself is about site policy), or make a new meta question listing all our current status of policy discussions.

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    Related: meta.gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/7842
    – user98085
    Jan 4, 2014 at 13:44
  • That's all well and good, but I'm not talking about actioned or inactioned questions, nor whether these questions are faq-worthy. I'm talking about obsolete ones. Ones that, whether they were finalised or left to rot, have since been made entirely irrelevant, by other actions, as is the case with a lot of burned/merged tags. On the [discussion] side of things, I never said the questions should be deleted, my suggestion was to close or lock them, as again, revival of these discussions would be irrelevant, at least at this point in time. (TBC)
    – Robotnik Mod
    Jan 4, 2014 at 14:08
  • To use the two example questions again, Why would we discuss the pros and cons of having the spoiler tag auto-hide questions, if we don't have a [spoiler] tag? Why should we leave open the debate of the wording and usage of the [strategy]/[tactics] tags if the tags don't exist? (Also, I'm also noticing a lack of [status-obsolete], perhaps that's the new tag that needs to be created?)
    – Robotnik Mod
    Jan 4, 2014 at 14:10
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    @Robotnik [status-norepro] actually does include a "can't be reproduced anymore" clause, which would apply to now-irrelevant requests. My point is simply that all of these should be actually actioned somehow (even if it's just "we decided to do something else, which solved this as well"), not just "closed because obsolete".
    – user98085
    Jan 4, 2014 at 16:04

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