Are we being encouraged to answer very old questions, or are they just being made more visually pleasing?

Question

Some time ago, perhaps still, new answers to old questions were put under review (in a review queue), as if to imply: 'This question has been addressed, at length; what could possibly be the value-add at this point.' Or so it seemed.

But the site evolves over time, as language does, and the chatty little answers or one-horse theories become quaint, like old Toy Town. Let's go play with the wooden toys! And metal? And bears with buttons, what? Well, they're not choking hazards…but they're not cute on a shelf either. I suppose they're meant to be time capsules, a history of language.

In any case, I no longer search active questions (only under week or month) because so much of the "activity" seems to be noncritical edits, which does not bother me (I would edit articles until the end of time…). But the question is…

Are they editing the old questions to make them actually active or merely more attractive? Or both, possibly.

I don't know what the intent is, but I avoid the "active" questions because so many are so old. Like, 'Eureka! Here's a nugget… Oh, this was abandoned 12 years ago; I'm here all alone. Never mind.'

But it seems like some recent questions found under active are not so easily found, if at all, under week or month. IDK how it's sorted; perhaps there is a link to info on that. TY.

Answer 1

Posts are edited for a number of reasons, but all edits must make the post better, especially when it's a post that's not currently on the "active homepage" since space there is limited and so many users rely on it. You should expect to see some amount of noise on this homepage, but if you see anything unusual or concerning you can flag.

Answering old questions is great to do (as long as your answers are good). For example, I provided an answer to What is the etymology of "business end"? because I wasn't thrilled with the answers the question got when posted in 2012.

The active homepage (the default view when you navigate to the site) shows questions that have been recently bumped (as long as those questions aren't significantly downvoted). Most bumps are from when the question or one of its answers was just posted, or if an edit was made to the question or one of its answers, but there's a laundry list of other reasons. (Note that deleting an answer does not un-bump the post, so someone like you under 10k rep won't always be able to determine what happened.) A question can only appear once on this list, no matter how much activity happens. This is significant; it means that an editor can go to town on any of the Q&A that show up on the homepage without pushing other questions off. I use this trick to edit quite extensively, so you might notice that I made minor edits all at once to six answers under a single question (something I wouldn't do all at once to six answers on six different questions that weren't recently bumped).

The active homepage is but one way to view questions and it may not be the most useful to you all the time. If you select "Questions" in the left sidebar, will find the "newest" questions list, which is probably the most useful of the tabs there (though there are others, just like the homepage also has "week" and "month"). If you want something more than that you can use search, which is very powerful. For example, here are all answers sorted by newest that score at least 3 (including new answers to old questions).