Ok, so we have our first suggestion, by Alexander Koko.
He suggests implementing a way for authors to keep their posts up to date.
I thought about this before, but haven’t yet managed to find an efficient way to make it happen.
Paying for minimal upgrades to posts would render us broke in very little time. Authors usually won’t do it for free because in the months/years that have gone by, they’ve usually moved on and don’t even remember what it is they were doing back when they wrote the post. Now, paying for full revisits is definitely an option - but a full revisit would be a completely new post, which is something that needs to be:
- sufficiently different from the old version to warrant a rewrite
- standalone - we can’t really republish new versions of entire series.
It would be easier if WP had a decent markdown plugin, which would let me put the content of the posts into Github for everyone to take a look at and tweak at will - this would be the most productive approach because the people reading the topic at hand will most likely be the ones most into it at that moment, and will be able to tweak the content to make it work for them, easily sharing their knowledge with others. However, with a disparity between content formats (original articles are MD, then converted to HTML for WP, and images are inserted additionally through the Edit Posts interface, a whole lot of processing obviously going on), that’s not really possible.
One ray of hope in the above matter is the WP REST API which, if done right, could be used to automate post updates from Github hosted article content, but that’s a long, long way off.
Suggestions on how to tackle outdated posts are welcome.