<p>I have noticed quite a lot of too-old-to-migrate software-heavy questions (mostly R, but not entirely) coming through the close review queue. </p>

<p>They are often clearly off-topic by current standards and I generally see merit to marking them as such. For example, they can be confusing to new users (and I note they are often highly-visited pages) in terms of what the scope of our site is. Some examples of the type of question I am talking about, though not all closed recently, are <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/7457/22228">here</a>, <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/29525/22228">here</a>, and <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/11924/22228">here</a>.</p>

<p>I have generally voted for closing them. But it has crossed my mind there is a disadvantage to this, which seems to have been the pattern when such votes have occurred: answers to coding questions can get out of date. People who use <code>ggplot2</code> in R will be well aware that changes to that package have invalidated many of the (irritatingly SEO-friendly) answers on SO &mdash; as well as some of the older ones on CV. (In fact, on CV, the issue is in some sense worse, because these tend to be our older inactive questions so are less likely to have been updated or attracted new answers than those on SO.) This is just one example and there is no reason to expect it to be unique. Closed questions, if not deleted, are going to leave old answers to ossify and unable to to be supplemented by fresher answers.</p>

<p>I have my own views about what the scope of this site <em>should</em> include regarding computing questions, but that is a separate matter from what I am raising here, since I am not calling for new questions to follow any different criteria to what we have at the moment. But for old computing questions, from the early days of the site before consensus about our current (somewhat narrower) focus emerged, I wonder whether we should consider being more liberal with letting them stand open &mdash; perhaps marked as "grandfathered" in some way so that new users do not mistake them as currently on-topic. (A "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause" rel="nofollow noreferrer">grandfather clause</a>" allows pre-existing exceptions to be exempted from newer standards. This seems to have happened to some extent on the "<a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1337/statistics-jokes">statistics jokes</a>" thread, for instance.)</p>
