So I'm just going to toss this out.
Let's say ..
Five people vote to deprecate an answer (let's say we gate this at 15k+ rep, gating it through tag participation is simply not possible from an engineering standpoint). Their combined signal says:
This answer is probably actively harmful even if it was once correct, and needs to get the heck out of the way so the modern world can creep in
... would it matter if we took the accept mark away? We have gone through at least six possible implementations of this that attempted to preserve the accept mark without making the sort order even more confusing - it won't work.
For this to be able to work, folks would need to be behind the idea that as an answer loses relevance and usefulness - so does any accept mark it once had. Now:
- It wouldn't take rep away from anyone
- It would be a pretty silent ordeal. There wouldn't be notifications of this process - it would be very similar to deletion.
- A deprecated answer would still be visible, but marked as deprecated and at the bottom of the pile (above any negatively scored answers if they existed)
- The status could possibly be reversed if a substantial edit was made to the answer.
We'd need a feature request that aggressive in order to consider it again, folks really do need to be behind dropping the accept mark in order to make deprecation work. It's like the .. purgatory .. before deletion, so we need to treat it pretty much like deletion.
I want to do this, I've worked at lengths with Bluefeet and Shog in order to come up with a system that handles this (we were always supposed to have this in place, it was always Jeff's intent to close this gap).
Come up with a feature request that treats deprecation basically like deletion, but with some possible ways out of it for those that discover that something was deprecated and still care enough about it despite knowing they won't lose any rep to fix it, and we'll take another shot at it. We can't mess with the sort order, we can't make this process noisy and causing contention all over the place - but we do need something.
I'm open to any sane idea given the above constraints, with a decent amount of support shown for it.
Here's a start on how to gate the feature:
- Must be an answer (though, we want to know if many answers to a question are deprecated, because the question probably has some issues too)
- Must be at least 1 year old
- Must have received at least 5 down votes in the last 30 days and still have a positive score of at least +5(? probably needs to be configurable so all sites can have it) - otherwise just delete the darn thing
- Must not be community wiki - otherwise just fix the darn thing
... you can take it from here :)