This is actually a very good idea that nobody seems to have considered. It would solve a lot of problems with answers turning invalid over time. And not just when answers “age away” because the technology has turned outdated.
Another example from SO which happens frequently:
Newbie posts a question and tags it C and C++ both.
Answers start coming in, some in C, some in C++.
Some veteran arrives and points out that the thing the OP is asking about is actually quite different between the languages. Or the OP realizes that they are only interested in C after all. Etc. The question is retagged C only.
Now all posted C++ answers are rendered irrelevant and technically incorrect.
Others users arrive late to the party and start down-voting the C++ answers since the question is seemingly about C.
Trying to rollback edits & salvage the whole thread from there on is very hard.
This scenario happens all the time (happened last time yesterday). If answers could be tagged as well, this wouldn’t be much of an issue. Then the posted C++ answers could be allowed to live with C++ tags and no harm done.
Possibly, but I’m not seeing how the logistics work out.
Answers address the question as it exists at that time, in the context of that time. Expecting answerers to somehow select tags for their answers sounds like a lot of busy work that ain’t gonna happen. The software would then probably use the tags from the question on the answer. Now you’re back to the original problem.
Who is going to curate this? If I answer a question relating to the current version of something, I obviously won’t be able to indicate which not yet existing future version the answer will also apply to. Two years later when the next version comes out, do you expect me to find all my answers relating to that product, then decide whether they apply to the new version also, and then tag them accordingly? I can’t imagine my future self thinking that’s a good way to spend volunteer time.
Well, actually, I had suggested them before, but that was in a comment on Discord, long before this forum even existed. Others quickly noted about how that would be too much of a burden to curate, and nobody supported it. Since I didn’t consider that idea particularly important myself, I didn’t follow up on it.
I’m now too lazy to search for it right now, but I’m sure it’s still preserved somewhere on Discord.
Maybe so, but IF we could find a way to make it work it would be a really good thing. I think this suggestion deserves an own thread to focus the discussion on just that.
It doesn’t have to be a burden at all, if each answer by default inherits all the tags of the question that the question had at the point where the answer was created. The poster can add additional tags if they think it’s meaningful, and then later on editors can change tags for archive/obsolete etc purposes.
And then possibly make it so that answers with tags that don’t match the tags of the question are made lower priority, greyed out etc, keeping them fully readable but marking them as obsolete.
It sounds like you are thinking of this as a required field, I was thinking of this as a purely optional field that could be used when either the person providing the answer is knowingly giving a version limited answer OR for questions that have existed for a long time and the accepted answer is no longer the best answer for common purposes and someone feels the need to “clean it up”.
If you operated under the assumption that the question/answer were from a point in time strictly a lot of the common questions like “how do I use appsettings app.config” would be re-asked every release and different version tags would have to be considered “not duplicate” even though that has not changed significantly for many versions at a time. What is or is not the same version to version is always going to require human intervention IMHO.
@Lundin 's suggestion would work if they were required, but I think you would end up spending a lot of moderator time adding all the version tags to the question that the asker overlooks when they just select the version they are using since they don’t know the answer in one version and therefore cannot no if it is the same across versions.