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The Community User often pings questions that have no accepted answer to get them more attention. Some of these are clearly no longer relevant, such as:

https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/45777/rename-standard-object-field-label-in-visualforce-page

I am tempted to close this question, but it is difficult to properly and succinctly justify. It seems extremely unlikely for this question to ever get an accepted answer.

  • OP answered their own question and didn't even accept it
  • OP is almost 2 years old

Should it be closed? Are there existing close reasons that fit this use case, or should a custom reason be provided?

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  • 4
    I can see the value of closing questions as being aged out particularly as the Salesforce platform is rapidly evolving and a lot of features are now there to resolve issues that would once have been difficult to do. The only issue I can see is if active review is necessary then would it be a productive use of community time.
    – Dave Humm
    Mar 16, 2016 at 9:29
  • 2
    You can always ping (@mention) the OP and ask them to mark as accepted
    – cropredy
    Mar 16, 2016 at 14:58
  • I mean, odds are extremely low someone is still working on a project that old, so their ability and motivation to confirm any answer may be compromised.
    – Adrian Larson Mod
    Mar 16, 2016 at 15:57
  • 4
    I was also thinking about this recently because of the meta question about soliciting answer marks. I'm not sure what the answer is, but I think that questions related to technology that is obsolete (e.g. S-Controls) or no longer applies because of modern features (e.g. modifiable audit fields) should probably be closed/updated/something else? Having obsolete information is almost as bad as having no information at all.
    – sfdcfox
    Mar 16, 2016 at 17:42
  • 2
    I think maybe we should start flagging these posts with custom reason for now (even better if we can get a template from SE moderator) and the SFSE moderators/high rep users can delete as necessary.
    – Boris Bachovski
    Mar 17, 2016 at 3:29
  • 3
    Personally i'm pro deleting questions that have no value anymore, but i'm not sure how well that fits with global SSE best practice(I should probably go and ask ..).
    – Samuel De Rycke
    Mar 18, 2016 at 9:30

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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There are two issues at play here, and deserve two different meta questions (so I will break then into separate answers - other answer here).

The second question is more unique to SFSE:

As Salesforce continues to develop, it eliminates older versions. Are questions still valid if they are based on the limitations that are no longer limitations (or features that are no longer features)?

My opinion on the second question is to neither close nor delete these questions, but to provide useful answers that are now obvious.

First, it would be a burden on the community, and doing it half-way would create a set of expectations that we cannot live up to.

Second, I think that old information is actually useful. Off the top of my head I can think of three distinct use cases for old information.

  1. When you're going through your org and trying to figure out why the previous admin/dev made the choices they made. But there's not a lot of advantage there.
  2. More important is when you are maintaining ancient Apex or VF code from, e.g., v16.0, and want to know about a particular undocumented bug/quirk or a workaround.
  3. Also, many "old" features in SFDC are deprecated but not removed from orgs that are already using them (like S-Controls).
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  • broken up so they can be voted on separately.
    – Charles Koppelman
    Mar 21, 2016 at 20:44
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There are two issues at play here, and deserve two different meta questions (so I will break then into separate answers - other answer here).

The first is the same problem that all other SE sites have to deal with:

Someone asked a question, answered it, and then left. What should we do?

My answer to the first question is the same as throughout the network. Either downvote the question, come up with a better answer, or as a community upvote a good answer. By the way, according to Meta StackExchange:

The Community user will bump non-negatively scored questions that have at least one answer scoring 0 and none scoring more than that.

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  • broken up so they can be voted on separately.
    – Charles Koppelman
    Mar 21, 2016 at 20:44

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