I just got four best answers, for questions from FOUR YEARS AGO, why does it take so long?

Voting. What happens is when it is in voting for a best answer, it ends in a tie, and then it sits in limbo until finally someone votes and breaks the tie. When it comes to voting, thumbs up count and are used to break a tie on votes. In your case, it was even, votes and thumbs up were the same for two or more answers, and finally someone voted recently, and the tie was broken. There is a group that looks for these outstanding tiebreakers located at:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Yah00AnswersTie...

I joined this group a while ago. Download the spreadsheet from the files section. The spreadsheet has subjects and such where there are outstanding questions. Every once in a while when I have a few free minutes, I open the spreadsheet and then vote on a few outstanding questions.

Because not everybody picks a Best Answer. So the questions go to voting - and stay there until one answer wins the vote. And since not everybody bothers to vote, either, this can take a long time.

To get that many in a cluster from that long ago sounds like TieBusters might be involved. That is a yahoo group that votes on old questions to help clear them out. The link to the group is on my profile page.

When you get a best answer to a very old question, that means someone has just voted and broken the tie. If you have just got four, that probably means one of your fans has been trawling through your old answers tie-busting.