---
title: Every answer needs an expiry date
description: >-
  Stack Overflow made me wait eight weeks to speak, then deleted some of what I said. Meanwhile the
  answers that survived have been aging in public since 2013.
url: https://expiredqueues.com/answers-need-expiry-dates/
date: '2026-07-05T10:00:00.000Z'
image: https://expiredqueues.com/images/og/answers-need-expiry-dates-0412391b.jpg
---

Retrospect posts stack-overflow

# Every answer needs an expiry date

5 July 2026 By Adrian 3 min read

Stack Overflow is over for me. Has been for years. Last answer I posted there is dated May 2017.

I want to be careful here, because "the site is dying" has been a genre of blog post for a decade and I am not interested in writing another one. This is narrower. It is about what the site did to me, and what it is still doing to the sixty-four answers I left behind.

## Eight weeks to say anything

[I signed up on 26 July 2013](https://expiredqueues.com/six-weeks-in-2013/). My first answer is dated 19 September.

The gap was not shyness. A new account could not comment. Could not do most things. You earn your way in by upvoting other people and waiting, and only after the counter clears the right threshold does the site let you participate properly.

So my introduction to the largest programming community in the world was several weeks of clicking arrows to prove I deserved to help. Yucky weeks. I remember the feeling more clearly than I remember any of the answers.

I understand why the gates exist. Spam is real, and moderating at that scale without automation is impossible. But there is a difference between a system that filters bad actors and a system where a working developer with something useful to say spends two months in a waiting room.

## And then they deleted them

Later, a number of my answers were deleted. Not by me. By other people - the community process, working as designed, on questions that were closed or cleaned up or judged not to belong.

Some of that was probably fair. But the effect from where I sat was simple: I wrote things, I helped somebody, and then the writing was gone and I found out afterwards.

So I stopped. Not with a rage-quit post, just by not going back.

## Meanwhile, the survivors

Here is the part that actually keeps me interested.

The sixty-four answers that survived are still there. Still being read - around 992,000 views across the questions they sit on. [My top answer alone accounts for 478,000 of those](https://expiredqueues.com/most-read-thing-i-wrote/).

They are also thirteen years old, and several of them are wrong now. Bootstrap classes that no longer exist. [A modal hack that broke in Bootstrap 4](https://expiredqueues.com/answers-i-went-back-to-fix/). A line telling people to disable pinch-to-zoom on their phones.

Nothing on the page says so. There is a date, in grey, at nine pixels, at the bottom. The accepted answer sits pinned at the top of the question forever, wearing a green tick that means "this solved it in 2013" and reads as "this is the answer."

My reputation moved by minus ten last year. Not because I did anything. The only thing still happening to my account is slow decay.

## What this blog does instead

Every post here older than five years opens with a stamp. Big vermilion box, the number of years, and a line telling you to read it with the date in mind. Ten years and over, the wording gets blunter: much of what it describes has changed or disappeared, and it is kept as a record, not as advice.

I did not build that to be clever. I built it because I have seventy-odd posts about PSD slicing and IE7 bugs, and people still land on them from search, and it would be dishonest to let those pages pretend to be current.

Stack Overflow could do the same thing tomorrow. It has the data - post age, last edit, the version numbers sitting right there in the tags. An accepted answer from 2013 on a `twitter-bootstrap` question could carry a banner the same size as the green tick.

I do not think reputation is the problem, and I do not think the moderators are villains. The problem is that [the interface treats a 2013 answer and a 2025 answer as the same kind of object](https://expiredqueues.com/books/the-design-of-everyday-things/), and puts the older one on top because somebody clicked a tick thirteen years ago.

Answers rot. Mine did. The site should say so, because I clearly was not going to.

[Previously I went back and fixed the commas](https://expiredqueues.com/answers-i-went-back-to-fix/) [Next The most-read thing I ever wrote is a Stack Overflow answer](https://expiredqueues.com/most-read-thing-i-wrote/)

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