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How do I downgrade an RPM on a machine without 'yum'?

I was downvoted this week for an 8 year-old answer here. It looks like the question and context was changed considerably since its original post.

How can we protect against out-of-context voting due to editing?

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How many moderator answers do you want? :)

If it were up to me I'd revert everything: restore the original version of the question and the title and undelete the comment by the OP that said it was a machine without yum.

Reverting the changes doesn't affect the selected answer, so there's no problem there, and undoing them makes it clear what the sequence was: you answered and then the OP added the extra information. In theory, it's better to incorporate the comment into the question, but to me it'd be better to leave it so that it doesn't invalidate your answer.

I'll wait and see what the votes/comments are on my suggestion (and/or the mods can comment in our chat room) before I do anything.

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Unfortunately, the effective answer is "We can't do anything, as the SE software doesn't provide any tools to prevent this". The only thing we can do is to lock questions or answers, but that would be a nuclear option I would only want to consider in extreme cases, and this wouldn't revert already cast votes.

That said, I've no idea how theoretical tools protecting from this would look like. How do you differentiate between different reasons for votes?

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  • It's no big deal, but I thought this was odd. I looked at the question and thought, "how did I miss what the OP was asking?!?". Then seeing the edit history, it made sense.
    – ewwhite
    Mar 24, 2019 at 16:27
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The edit invalidate your answer, but you must know the edit was because of a old OP comment he left 2 hours after your answer. (that he has not yum)

I don’t know how we can protect into that specific case, as I see it as a human error, as the OP should had left you that comment (on your answer or tagged), as it was surely because of your answer he wrote it, and a really late edit that brought back the question into the feed.

Reverting the edit could be an option, but the edit was fair if you take into context the OP comment.

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    The best compromise I could think is to revert the title of the question (removing "without yum") and edit the body to indicate "preferably without yum", but doesn't restrict it strictly, so everybody wins... though I'm afraid it could make the question too broad...
    – Andrew T.
    Mar 24, 2019 at 15:24

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