How should we disambiguate between questions that are only for a Drupal version, and questions that are valid since a specific version?

Question

Normally, when a question is tagged 7 it means the question is for Drupal 7, and not Drupal 6; nothing is said about the validity of the answers for Drupal 8. So, a question about DBTNG is valid for Drupal 7, and Drupal 8 (and possibly for Drupal 9), but a question about the Dashboard module introduced in Drupal 7 doesn't apply for Drupal 8, as that module has been removed in Drupal 8.

The only way I can think to disambiguate between questions that are only valid for a Drupal version, and questions that are valid since a Drupal version is leaving a comment about that. I don't mean we should hunt for any of those questions, and add a comment when the question is not anymore valid for any version past the one for which the question has been tagged, though.

Using multiple version tags is probably more difficult; it would mean to add a tag for every new Drupal version, and a question that is valid since Drupal 6 would get tagged as 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and so on. A question that is valid for at least 5 Drupal versions would easily reach the limit for the number of tags allowed for a question, considering that normally there is at least another tag that is not the version tag.

Is there any other way to disambiguate such questions that we could adopt, in the case it is really necessary doing so? I would think it is helpful for who reads any of the questions asked on Drupal Answers.

Answer 1

I do not think this is really a problem.

Relatively few questions are version specific. If there is not room for all applicable version tags, I see little harm in omitting the oldest version tags, as these will point to obsolete version that few people use. Having the question tagged with the most recent versions is what will help most people searching for an answer by tag. If necessary, additional details about versions can be in spelled out in the text of answers: "This works in Drupal 7 and Drupal 6, but not in Drupal 5".

But the majority of questions seems to be rather broad, being about the general Drupal architecture or the community. Hence, version specific questions can be tagged with the most recent version that is applicable, while the majority should be without a version tag. Tagging with one or more versions should only be done if the answer really is version specific (and in those case, I suspect that only a single version tag will be applicable).

Also see these discussions:

• Version tags considered harmful
• Numeric version tags considered ... OK

(However, if somebody is able to demonstrate that there is a real need to tag a question with multiple version numbers, I think the best solution is to expand the number of allowed tags to six or seven (whatever is necessary), so that people will be able to tag questions 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, hooks, etc. I think that alternatives to this, such as creating new tags (e.g. 5-7) to indicate multiple versions will be search-unfriendly.)