I think you are correct. I'd take a look through the story again, just to see why, but I believe you're right. People sometimes don't look at the publish date for the stories they mark.

Unless it's in Historical Archive, you can slap M4R or even Delete Now on a story regardless of age as long as you feel it's below QS.

At least, that's how it used to be. Perhaps things have changed. I personally don't think it's that big of a deal.

Edit: I can't find anything in the site rules about it, so it doesn't appear that the rules regarding M4R have actually been changed. I think it's just not common practice to mark old pastas for review.

There is an unwritten rule that that older stories are treated more leniently under quality standards and should only be hit with an M4R if you have a really good reason. Helel had to warn JDeschene a few months ago because she M4R'd a bunch of stories from years ago without being aware of this custom. As Helel told her, if the story has been edited by a staff member, especially recently, it's probably good to stay.

That said older stories are not immune to M4R, and I actually marked a five-year old pasta for deletion a couple months ago because I knew there was no way staff would not want it deleted once they saw it.

A few months ago Empy also M4R-d an old pasta that had in the past been edited by staff because it was a basic undeveloped narrative of a sex offender mentally fantasizing about raping his next victim as she exited her school without there really being anything else to it, and he recognized that the community had changed enough since 2013 when it was posted that it was time to revisit whether it belonged on the wiki even with it being posted before contemporary quality standards. The admin who reviewed it agreed and deleted the page.

This is definitely a new thing, seeing as in the past crappypastas would be deleted left and right regardless of age or who previously edited them. Then again, the wiki was also younger and the quality standards were constantly evolving.

There should probably at least be a note of this in the rules if this is the case now. Maybe not a hard rule, but just some general guidelines of what to do when you see an old pasta that falls below QS on Creepypasta Wiki:Flagged and Marked Categories.

Well you have to keep in mind, our Deleter-in-Chief Empy gave up his position, and I suppose in his absence the admins have had to make their own interpretations as to how to proceed with enforcing quality standards. It's been a couple years since the last major review and revision of the site rules, and maybe it's time to have another periodic comprehensive revisitatation of the rules.

Yeah, I imagine Empy stepping stepping down changed the game quite a bit.

I think a revisitation of the rules would be a good idea. They probably wouldn't need as drastic of a revision as they did a few years ago - when what the Quality Standards page said and what the Quality Standards had come to mean had become so dramatically different that the page basically had to be re-written from the ground up by 2014, and then again in 2015. I think just a few minor tweaks here and there would be good enough this time around.