Time Limit for Up/Down Votes

[Ancient Dragon]

I recently received up votes for posts I made over 5 years ago! Really?? -- shouldn't there be a time limit for such things? I appreciate the up votes, but they are pretty-much meaningless after all this time.

[Dani]

No, I don't feel there should be a time limit because a main attribute of the forums is that everything you write not only helps the OP but lives on to help many, many millions of people years into the future.

[happygeek]

Agreed with Dani. Can't see why something you posted might not be as useful/interesting/worthy or equally annoying/pointless/wrong as it was a month/year/decade ago.

I agree with the above, although if you really have an issue, link me to that post and I would be more than happy to downvote it. ;)

[jwenting]

of course there's a danger of posts receiving a flood of unwarranted downvotes that over time become invalid because of changes in infrastructure or technology.

[Ancient Dragon]

Huh? How could a downvote become invalid due to changes in technology?

[deceptikon]

Huh? How could a downvote become invalid due to changes in technology?

The answer may have been excellent 10 years ago, but as technology and techniques change it becomes outdated and bad advice. If posts aren't read in the context of their post date, I can easily see downvotes showing up on long dead threads.

[Dani]

I'm a bit confused, but I'm not so sure that's what jwenting is referring to?

[<M/>]

@dani, i believe that is what he is referring to and deceptikon has answered it.

[jwenting]

yes, it is. Poorly worded on my part. Think someone advising to use the latest and greatest hyped whatever, which get a dozen upvotes.
A year or two later, someone discovers that thread and starts ridiculing it because something else is now the latest and greatest, coming in with the usual me2! crowd who all downvote it into obscurity causing it to end up at -12 instead in the space of a few hours.

[Troy III]

There are lot's of occasions when I happen to be boldly notified that:
"this thread is { [xx] months : years} old"
etc etc

I don't think that people are that blind or illiterate to not see or understand that a solved ie 5 year old thread, has a five years old solution!
Every knowledge seeking surfer will come to that post with backward compatibility in mind and make the best out of it combining the acquired old working code with modern most recent methods and practices.

[Dani]

As Troy mentions, there's a big notification where it tells you that you're reading an old thread. Honestly though, I've gotten some of my best helpful responses on the web from really old forum threads over the years!

[deceptikon]

I don't think that people are that blind or illiterate to not see or understand that a solved ie 5 year old thread, has a five years old solution!

Even with the big notification in the quick reply, we still see people posting to threads that are several years old as if they were started just yesterday. It's a short leap to imagine people voting with the same tunnel vision.

I'm not arguing for or against a time limit, just pointing out that this situation is far from improbable.

[BigPaw]

The Internet is just a big archive, like a big collection of chutes with boxes at the end. Some of those boxes have a lot of good things in them. Some of them are now decades old, but still contain good stuff.If you're rummaging through a tool box, looking for the right tool to tighten that bolt, wouldn't it help if you could find it quite quickly to get the job done, to get past that problem?

In a technical setting like this, an answer is going to be either right or wrong, helpful or unhelpful. Very often a user will have to read through a string of posts, trying a string of solutions. Daniweb helps the process of elimination along with the "Solved by..." feature. But, the "Up Vote" also helps the process of elimination along. The "Solved by..." helped the original poster, (OP) the "Up Vote" can be from other people either there and then or further down the stream of time who may have been helped by something from the suggested method, even if the post they "Up'd" wasn't the conclusive answer for the OP. So, now the thread is benefitting in two ways, a conclusive answer to a specific issue, and also, because of the "Up" voted approved techniques other visitors have been helped by.

It would be a shame to lock away the option to vote positively on a good thing, a vote that could be a helpful advisory to whomever whenever. If this was a medical forum discussing medical treatments, then it would be a very good idea to have a regular review an what information and advice is available in the archives. But proven and endorsed technical solutions rarely, if ever, change.

[Reverend Jim]

I disagree with you on only one point. Coding solutions from several years ago tend not to work "out of the box". As the particular language evolves with new releases, things that once worked, work no longer. Just try running a Python 2.5 program under Python 3.x, or a vb4-5-6 app in vb.net 2012.

[jwenting]

/me mutters something unspeakable about Turbo C 1.5

[Assembly Guy]

Just throwing this out there, I'm not for or against:
Perhaps downvotes could be put on downvoting.