In How do we want to handle questions with radically different answers for Drupal 7 (and lower) and Drupal 8 (and higher)?, we solicited thoughts on how we as a community want to handle the fact that some questions here can have radically different approaches depending on the version of Drupal being used, especially in Drupal 8.
Voting results for the answers posted to that question (at the time this answer was posted):
While Drupal Answers has version tags, their use is discouraged per the tag wikis.
If the system doesn't seem to work according to the documentation (= the tag wikis), then fixing the documentation is a possible solution ...
The diamond moderators have taken this up as a general Stack Exchange issue, and as of 2017/02/25, this is our guidance (part of which can be read at How should software related SE sites handle drastic version changes?).
I suggest to include a relevant quote about that "part of which", for multiple reasons:
- to be sure it is clear to which part it is a reference to.
- links may stop working, or its content may get updated, so better include a relevant quote about it "here" so that this question here is not affected by such things.
We should continue to use tags only when necessary, per what is currently in the wiki. Yes, we know this doesn't reflect the voting. But, it better reflects Stack Exchange in general.
True, that does not reflect the voting from the Drupal.SE community members who did the effort to digest that question (and upvote/downvote).
But IMO it also does not reflect:
- the recommendation in the only answer to the question on meta.SE, and which states (in bold): Drupal Answers needs to break down and start using version tags.
what is included in the current Drupal-tag on stackoverflow (first introduced for drupal-6 and drupal-7 via this tag edit):
Each major release of Drupal is not completely compatible with the previous; hence, the importance of using the version tags (e.g. drupal-5, drupal-6, drupal-7, drupal-8) whenever appropriate.
... that sounds like "stackoverflow" does not fit with Stack Exchange in general related to those similar tags, no?
As a community, we need to remember that people asking questions may not know tag policy or whether something is specific, and that it is our (as in everyone, not just the diamond moderators) collective responsibility to tend the site and adjust tags for the long term, to add them when needed and remove them when not. I think this is something we overlooked during our initial discussions.
True that often times when people asking questions may not know such things. But if you post an answer that doesn't seem to fit with what they "had in mind" (but didn't specify in their question), they'll right away tell you the answer doesn't work for their case ...
This also means that we need to avoid the "What version are you using" and immediately editing it in as a tag as a general rule. It does mean, though, that if we know an answer will differ radically based on version, we can try to solicit this information via comments and potentially tag. In this case, though, we shouldn't be discouraging answers for each version or an answer that covers multiple versions.
This seems to me that posting an answer like "This answer is for Drupal version X" is (still) OK ... Better still, I think it's a way to protect your answer from being invalidated by OPer, such as my answer to "How to set "Entity has Field" when the Rules Event is unrelated to the entity?":
- I intentionally did not ask about the release it was about (with the above "guidance" in mind).
- I added the PS to my answer.
- Then a comment was posted with "Thank you so much for answering, apologies though, this is about D8 ...".
Too bad, I (my answer) was first, and changing the question after it got answered "so drastically" that it invalidates my answer is not allowed.
For the short term, I think that we can start to adjust questions a smidge to reflect the model that ones like How can I enforce maintenance_mode at all times in a specific environment? have. Discuss a scenario in in Drupal 7, and ask how to do it in Drupal 8 now that things have changed.
That sounds like most of the (existing) questions that have no answer for D8 yet, are now open for an additional D8 answer (assuming such answer would be radically different from answers for pre-D8 releases).
It'll be interesting to see what'll happen to answers to existing D8-questions, which are like "just in case somebody wonders how to do this in D7, here it is: ...".
This is not an ideal situation, and not a solution that everyone agrees with, but this is the best current fit for the Stack Exchange model.
I'll consider this phrase as a summary of this "topic". As per my answer to the original question it's clear that "I" have another opinion, but I find it more important to know what the Rules of the Drupal.SE game are ... hoping that everybody will (be forced to) respect them.
After about 2 months of monitoring the brand new questions, my rough estimate is that there are about 20% of the new questions that do NOT have a version tag when first posted. And I noticed question edits by moderators which didn't take away such tags in quite a few of the edited questions.
