How should older "on the bubble" questions be handled?

Question

I ran across this question today, and was initially tempted to vote-to-close as Not Constructive because the question asks:

Is there anything like this out there?

which is really a polling or search question. Then I read a bit more, and thought that the real underlying question was about managing a process that is:

priority-based instead of timetable-based and have an easy to create top-level project/task which only optionally needed subtasks.

With those things in mind, I'm ambivalent about the status of this question. It certainly has characteristics that make it seem closeable without editing, but I'm a bit reluctant to edit out all the context to the process part of the question.

How should older questions like this be handled when they're on the bubble?

Answer 1

Your Constructiveness Instincts:

With subjective questions, sometimes it's helpful to look at the answers that a question receives in order to determine if your instincts about the question's constructiveness were in fact correct. If you see a lot of answers posted that are links to blogs, books, or software, that's a pretty strong indication that you have a not constructive question on your hands.

For the most part, the answers provide details about the software and how it can solve the problem. For the most part, I can't say that they're bad answers. They're not perfect, but they do show effort. One user recently even posted a link to a product, provided an explanation, and added a disclaimer that she was personally involved in the solution she posted. Overall, the answers here are a lot better than most software recommendation questions I've come across. This is not the norm for these types of posts, as typically they receive very low quality answers and spam.

Edit or Close? (Or Do Nothing)

As for editing, time may have robbed us of our opportunity to make the sweeping changes to the post that would be needed in order to cast away all doubts about the question's constructiveness. I'm not sure it can be edited without greatly changing the main idea of the question and invalidating 9 answers, which most likely were posted by people who may or may not be hanging around to fix them.

Had this been a newer question, commenting, closure, and editing would be a no-brainer and could turn it into something really awesome.

With that said, if it looks like our community would recommend closure, or even deletion, then maybe it might be worth making those sweeping edits -- as a drastic, last-ditch measure -- to try to save something that might have value.