When rules change but votes don't, how to handle it?

Question

Sometimes, not that rarely, rules change in RPGs. Answers that were good become objectively, definitely wrong overnight, through no fault of their writer.
The accepted course of action is to do nothing, hoping that the previous voters realize the change in the facts, and modify their votes accordingly.

However, they do not. Either they do not know there was an errata, and even if they do, you can not expect people to follow all their votes, for ever. And if they do, they might not change their votes, because of the time constraint ("Your vote is locked unless the answer is edited"). The right answer for this question has only 4 votes, 10 less than the wrong one. Half a year has passed since the errata, so our approach of waiting for the problem to fix itself clearly does not work.
Someone who is unaware of the errata gets the wrong answer, which is against the intentions of this site.

Update after a week: The votes are now 11 to the right answer, 9 to the old one, very far from convincing.

How can we fix this?

I see 6 options:

1. Downvote the old answer, upvote the new one, comment on old one
   • Pros: Does not offend anyone, moves things in the right direction, takes small effort
   • Cons: I just demonstrated that it failed to give the expected result even after 7 months
2. Create a meta question about it
   • Pros: Does not offend anyone, moves things in the right direction
   • Cons: I just demonstrated that it failed to give the expected result even after a week, also quite high effort (I planned doing this question for a month)
   • Cons: Invisible for a casual user, who just wanted to find the right answer for the original question
3. Completely rewrite the old answer to reflect the new ruling
   • Pros: Now the highest rated answer is also the best one
   • Cons: Against current rules, more importantly could start editing wars
4. Edit the old answer, add "obsoleted by rules change" as first line
   • Pros: Low effort, highly visible
   • Cons: The writer of the answer could delete it
5. Use the flag "in need of moderator intervention"
   • Pros: Low effort, highly visible
   • Cons: Not immediatel clear why it was flagged
6. Create new flag "obsoleted by rules change"
   • Pros: Low effort, highly visible, and clear
   • Cons: Might not be technically feasible

I would suggest option 4 or 6.

Answer 1

Downvote and (optionally) comment the old answer, upvote the new answer.

This actually has a twofold effect. It notifies the OP of the old answer that there may be an issue that needs to be addressed, and it also serves to begin the process of floating the new answer to the top and dropping the old answer to the bottom.

If this is still insufficient, you could (and I've done this myself), offer a bounty to award the new answer and thus draw attention to the question.

If the old answer is accepted, there may be issues there, but a note to the OP of the question that the ruling has changed is not out of line. In rare cases the answerer of the accepted answer will realize it's incorrect and that there is now an established correct answer and want to delete their answer. In this case the OP should flag it and ask the moderators to delete their answer since they cannot do it themselves. Moderators are typically quite responsive to these flags (though in rare cases they may see value in retaining the original answer if it's providing other value outside of the incorrect answer).

Answer 2

Here are the options available to you if you disagree with the top voted and/or accepted answer:

Your options #1 and #2 are acceptable but other answers have covered why #3-6 are not. Instead I will cover the range of options you do have within the SE system to deal with cases like these. In general, they can be used in any combination.

Comment on the top/accepted/incorrect answer

Leaving a comment for the person who wrote the answer that is now outdated gives them a chance to review the facts and determine whether they want to change their answer accordingly or not. If changes can be made to the answer to accommodate the new information they can integrate that info into their answer and the answer should now be (more) correct. If the new information would reverse their answer then they might agree to delete it. In the rare case that an author realizes that their accepted answer is incorrect they can request a mod to delete it by flagging it.

If the author is no longer active, this has a low chance of working.

Upvote better answers and/or downvote incorrect ones

Obviously the standard way to indicate an answer's quality is to vote, one way or the other. Obviously you have only one vote but you can try to attract more...

Draw attention to the post to attract other voters

There are several ways you can attract eyes onto the post:

• Start a bounty (including a custom message with the bounty pointing people to flaws in the answer may help inform voting)
• Point people to it in chat (you can even explain your issues with it there and people may look into it and vote according to their whims)
• Point people to it here on Meta.se (if there is a meta-worthy issue to address)
• Post your own answer (see below) which bumps the question into the queue of active questions

Post your own answer

If there are no correct answers to upvote, write your own! This also has a couple of non-obvious advantages: it bumps the question in the active queue (and maybe even in the Late Answers queue) which means it might get more eyes, and it notifies the author of the question of the new answer which might get them to look at the answers again as well.

Comment on the question

Especially when the issue is with an accepted answer, leaving a polite comment to the author of the question may let them know that you believe there is new information that may change which answer they want to accept. Of course they are free to not act on it at all if they do not want to for whatever reason.

Be patient

Sometimes the Stack moves slowly, so don't expect that your actions will necessarily have immediate results. But the idea is that, over time, the correct answer will win out, so just do what you can and then leave the rest to the system. An important idea on Stack is that no one person determines what is correct or incorrect, instead depending on the wisdom of crowds. It is just that sometimes crowds take a while to work.

Answer 3

@waxeagle's answer is the correct one, but if you're unsatisfied with the results of that course of action, and you really want to mark a particular answer as being the correct one in a visible way, you could use a bounty. Obviously, it's up to you to decide if it is important enough to you to be worth spending your rep on.

Pros:

• Draws attention to the question by placing it in the Featured tab.
• Using a customised bounty message, you can explain why you're bountying so that the attention you draw can be directed the way you want it to.
• Once the bounty is awarded, the answer it was awarded to has a thing on it to draw people's attention to it.

Cons:

• Works much better while the bounty is active than once it's awarded.
• May cause additional, unnecessary answers that don't really add anything.
• Obviously, it costs rep.

Note: There is a conflict of interest here, given the context of this meta, so I'm suggesting this for the general problem rather than your specific example.

Answer 4

Part of the virtue of the Stack format is that no one person can enforce their view of which answers are correct.

That includes mods. That also includes you (whoever the "you" is that is reading this at the moment.)

Of the methods of dealing with an "incorrect" answer suggested in the answer:

1. This has already been done.
2. This has already been done.
3. This is not permitted because it alters the intent of the author of the post. It also invisibly hijacks the votes on a post to falsely endorse the lone editor's idea of what is correct.
4. This is not permitted because it alters the intent of the author of the post. It has a similar hijacking problem, though to a lesser degree because it is visible instead of invisible and therefore less likely to deceive readers.

5. Moderators aren't allowed to make that decision. We even have a specific, hard-coded flag rejection reason that says so:

   flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer

   Don't send us flags about incorrect answers. They'll only be rejected, which would only (with a lot of rejections) result in losing flagging privileges entirely.

6. Not technically feasible (since flag reasons are network-wide, and hardcoded, they cannot be customised per-site), and would be rejected even if it was possible (for the same reasons as #5).

Basically: chill. Fixing this is not your job. You've already done plenty, and it's on the path to voters correcting this, as is proper on a Stack. If you're so impatient for Truth To Win Out that a mere week is insufficient for the normal site mechanisms to work and you feel the need to immediately make it correct according to your own personal standard, you gotta seriously chill out. A year from now the votes will likely have a wider division.

If that's not good enough: sorry, no one user gets to decide which answers are correct and which aren't, so you just have to deal with being unhappy about the votes.

Answer 5

Comment on the old obsolete answer and the question. If there is no reaction to the comments, then edit a note on the obsolete answer, as per suggestion 4 in the original post.

This gives the original asker and answerer an invitation and opportunity to consider the change (to edit their answer, to select another answer as the best one, to change their votes). If there is no action, then editing the obsolete note into the answer unlocks votes and is a usual case of editing useful content from comments to answers and questions.

The errata note might look something like:

After this answer was originally posted there has been errata / rules changes [link]

---

[the previous answer here]

---

Justification of adding in the errata

From the help center, "When should I edit posts?":

1. To fix grammar and spelling mistakes
2. To clarify the meaning of the post (without changing that meaning)
3. To include additional information only found in comments, so all of the information relevant to the post is contained in one place
4. To correct minor mistakes or add updates as the post ages
5. To add related resources or hyperlinks

Adding a mention of new errata fits the criteria 3-5. It somewhat conflicts the parenthetical clarification of criterion 2, but even this is arguable.

Some other quotes from the same web page, out of order, out of context:

All contributions are licensed under Creative Commons, and this site is collaboratively edited, like Wikipedia. If you see something that needs improvement, click edit!

Editing is important for keeping questions and answers clear, relevant, and up-to-date. If you are not comfortable with the idea of your contributions being collaboratively edited by other trusted users, this may not be the site for you.

Any time you see a post that needs improvement and are inclined to suggest an edit, you are welcome to do so.

Answer 6

I think the solution would be not make things more complex. Maybe just to give more relevance to how old questions and answers are on the site would help people to realize that the once right answer seven years ago could not be correct today.

To add functionality to solve things is not efficient. Rules can change... not only forward but backward. Some changes are reversed or again superseeded by future rules. Then, what you fix now, could be again wrong in a year or more. No one is going to track that madness.

Dates are small things on these sites, we can show them a little bit more and maybe add something that says "5 months old" or "posted three years ago".