Many people are actually answering my old questions over 5 years ago. What are you suspecting from that?

If you happen to answer a question that already has a Best Answer, it often triggers an algorithm to present "Related" questions on the right column sidebar. Those related questions are often many years old, but people get duped into answering them anyway, because of their proximity to the "Trending" and "Answer" questions. It's happened to me a couple times.

But what also happens, that makes no sense, is when an old question is obviously answered by a robot that is pasting a near-coherent Answer together out of related words culled from the question. This makes no sense because most of these old questions were awarded a Best Answer (it was in the day of voting) and so the robot gets no points for answering.

I've noticed the same thing too in recent weeks, it seems older questions are popping up for some reason and people are answering them because they are 'there' to be answered... even though they don't need to be or the asker already picked a best answer for it.

You can still answer older questions even if they have been resolved by the asker.

It is happening because your old questions will be on the internet until forever more. When people pose a question on google loads of replies come up including ancient Yahoo Q&A. Can you imagine, they will be floating around in the ether when you are long dead.

They may have run out of New Questions to Answer so they went into some Older Questions and Answered those

It happens all the time. There are a number of scripts that will "boost" a new account to Level 7 very quickly, usually by posting irrelevant or single word answers to random questions. They tend to target older questions, because it won't show up in the "Recent Questions" list and many older accounts are abandoned - making it less likely the answer will be reported and removed.

These people are trying to get points to ask more trolling questions and more up levels. Most of the think that no one will report them when answering old and maybe questions with a BA already. Other than using the points to ask more trolling questions they want to move up to level 3 so they can post hyperlinks to scam people.

You are getting them because questions are opened forever and anyone can answer them.

Same. I think they are bots. They'll write a huge paragraph of nonsense.

YES ...i have been seeing years old questions ...very odd to me ....so your not the only one being affected!!!

point farmers reaping points at 2 points per question answered