Why are old questions not being closed

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Old questions (or answers to them) might still be relevant for newer versions of Fedora. For example server or command line related questions are rarely outdated.

But I guess main reason is there is no automatic way to close them or tell if they are still relevant. And of course, it's not neccesary to close them -- we can leave them open even if they are outdated/irrelevant for newer versions of Fedora.

(I'm not an askfedora admin/moderator, this is just my opinion.)

Speaking as a moderator, none of us have the time to go over old questions and close those that aren't relevant. However, we will close a question without hesitation if somebody gives an "answer" to an old, out-dated question that's been forgotten for several years, especially if it doesn't even refer to the same Fedora version as the question did.

I agree w/ @sideburns, and @vtrefny, though perhaps for different reasons :) Marking questions as closed would be tedious and not fruitful, since they would still show in search results.

The best way to handle old questions is to maintain them; if the question is similar to yours but unsolved, make a comment; the system should push it up to the top of the queue for fresh eyes and there's one less redundant question in the search results. If a question is clearly useless for everyone except the visitor who abandoned it, you can delete it, or flag it for deletion note to self: check offensive flag reasons You can retag questions if they apply to a relevant release, once you have some karma. Moderators can even merge questions or make common ones into a wiki to make the question more broadly useful.

Keep in mind that moderators on the site are simply members of the community with sufficient karma; as you contribute to the site, the system awards more privileges. The general idea is that by awarding you karma for your comments, or for your curation, the community self-selects those with a demonstrated ability to create and catalyze helpful, quality content. That could be you!

Old questions maybe can help sometimes; but a filter warning about the question is very old, is a best idea.

tl;dr: Old answers are bad.

I don't agree with all the other answers. We had yum a year ago and have dnf now. In 1 year we will have Wayland as default (hopefully) and not X11 (as today). Software gets renamed, packages get updates and new names (gtk2 → gtk3, qt4 → qt5, KDE → Plasma, …). Backends change (OpenGL → Vulkan, DRI2 → DRI3, …). Many answers don't apply any more. Anything more than 2 years old should be deleted in my opinion.

(No moderator either)