How should questions about defunct services be handled?

Question

I was revisiting my reputation history tonight and came across an answer I submitted to a question about Aardvark, a social Q&A service that Google closed down during its "More Wood Behind Fewer Arrows" cleaning spree.

Since Aardvark is doubtless only one of many now-defunct services covered by questions on Web Apps, I'm curious if there is (or needs to be) some way of marking those questions as pertaining to a service that no longer exists.

For instance, should votes be allowed on questions referring to defunct services? Should those votes, if allowed, count toward reputation? Is there a case for rewriting the question and its answers to be in the past tense? Other considerations?

Answer 1

I agree with Anna, Aarthi & Eight on this. As the service is no longer available the questions should be closed "too localized".

There were two questions tagged aardvark which I have now closed.

For any questions that you come across where the service no longer exists then these questions should be closed also.

If you do not have sufficient privileges to cast close votes then please flag for Moderator attention.

Answer 2

Much like how we handled the questions about Google Wave. It's no longer up and running, now in read-only mode if at that, and all those questions are closed or being closed as too localised.

After a while, they'll be deleted and the votes from those washed away from the participating users' reputations.

Answer 3

The questions and answers should probably be made invisible or otherwise made low-visibility in search results etc. by some mechanism.

However this is done, though, it should not result in related reputation being revoked.

People who contributed to the site through questions and answers that were valuable at the time should not be penalized for an action completely disconnected from their efforts (the related web service being discontinued).

Retroactively deleting reputation, the way it looks like things are currently being done, could alienate users in general, and it may even make users more reluctant to post on web services that are newer or somehow in question.

Holding to the promise not to devalue any of user's past work might require a new kind of mechanism, where questions are put into a kind of "archived" status with no future deletion (at least of the rep generated by them).

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Edit:

Thanks to AlEverett for pointing out that reputation is not revoked in some cases. These cases are either

• score of >= 3 and visible for >= 60 days, or
• score of >= 3 or visible for >= 60 days

(The relevant MetaStackOverflow post on answer deletion says "and", but the relevent StackOverflow blog entry introducing the exception is unclear.)

If it is "or", then good questions and answers on topics that were once useful should mostly be covered by the "visible for >= 60 days criterion. Not all will be, though.

If it is "and", then the problem remains a big one. There are plenty of useful questions and answers that happen not to get up to a score of 3. If that were a valid criterion, then instead of being applied just for out-of-date topics, it would also be applied to questions that are simply old...but it is not. I don't see any reason not preserve reputation related to all questions and answers deemed worthy of being on the site while the topic was current. If some people think there should be a different standard, though, and want to base it on votes, it should be a lower barrier, such as having a vote score of >=1, or just having no downvotes.