Is there a point in closing very old questions with an upvoted and accepted answer?

Question

Take a look at this old question: "how to put permission to only paid users can print something in my drupal site".

It is from April last year, and has an accepted answer with four upvotes. It was closed about ten months after it was was asked (FTR: I voted to leave open, and now it is open again).

I am very much in favour of closing bad, old questions that does not have an accepted answer. That pesky community user keeps re-inserting such questions on the front page, and if it is a bad question - that is just noise.

But if the question already has an accepted answer, and it wasn't closed when it was fresh - it could have not been that bad. After all, somebody were able to answer it and the answer solved the problem for the OP.

And maybe a new module, or something else, comes along that may give grounds for an even better answer in the future? In this case, the Adobe's PDF format happens has a built-in DRM-feature that is easy to integrate with Drupal that isn't mentioned in the answer given. Adobe's built-in DRM will do exactly what the OP want. If the question is closed, that answer can't be given.

I suggest we leave these alone, in particular if they're very old. To nominate those for closure just makes the close queue longer and prevents updated answers from being posted.

Answer 1

The fact the question does have an accepted answer doesn't make the question a candidate to stay open. If that would be the case, then OP's would quickly accept an answer just to keep the question open.

I would rather use other criteria when deciding if a question should be closed. Closing questions that are not duplicates just means "we don't want such questions asked here" and give to the new users the "don't ask questions like this" message. If the question is that bad, for example because it is rather subjective, then it should be closed.

As for closing old questions, Stack Exchange sites are normally more permissive about the allowed questions, but become more restrictive as time goes on. That is normal: At the beginning, the purpose of the site is still being defined; once its purpose is defined, more question will be closed.
It is also normal to start closing those bad questions that keeps being asked. For example, if the question about a module to use would start be asked from people who don't even look at Drupal.org to find it, then there could be the need to start closing them, if they don't follow some quality criteria. Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean that old questions should be automatically closed, but that some of those questions that are very bad examples could be closed. After all, we don't want to hear "you closed my question but this bad question is still open."