Item — HN Reader

There is a badge for exactly that - Necromancer ( http://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/17/necromancer ): Answered a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or more.

Whenever a question gets a new post it gets bumped up to the top of the activity again - the same amount of possible attention as when an hour old question gets a new answer too.

2 comments

Yes. I shouldn't have said nobody. I actually like answering old questions, for example. I've earned that badge 10 times :)

What it really comes down to, though, is that when somebody asks a new question, I want to answer their new question, with all of its subtleties, in response to its particular phrasing, in its context.

It depends on the question. If it previously didn't have an answer or only had one, it goes to the top. If it had 5 OK answers and you add a 6th really awesome one, the ranking doesn't change much - expect it to be totally ignored.

That is not always the case. Consider http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/263542/ in which an answer was posted three years after the question was asked and two years since the last visible answer was posted ( http://programmers.stackexchange.com/posts/65281/timeline ) and is now the second highest answer in the question. That doesn't sound like 'totally ignored'.

It does happen. In fact, I think that a couple of my best (and highest-voted) answers are necromancers. However, I should note that the question you linked has 51464 views. And a lot of the questions I've earned necromancer for were similarly well-viewed. That's not typical. Most old questions get a fraction of those views.

Edit: In fact, I should admit that I usually only put the effort into answering old questions when it's something that has a lot of views. It's an indication that the question is linked somewhere prominent or is ranking well for some search terms. Those questions are worth putting the time in for. Most aren't.

I challenge you to find a similar question on StackOverflow. On some of the other, slower StackExchange sites I can see that it might be different.