Provide 10k users more close votes

Question

Please provide 10k+ users more close votes.

Why?

• Putting questions on-hold in a timely fashion is critical in providing useful feedback to new users. It's rare for salvageable questions to be put on-hold without a constructive comment having been left. Quickly putting questions on-hold keeps the question from attracting answers that may be invalidated by the suggested edits.

• Anecdotal evidence shows that we're seeing a number of low-quality questions coming from users with question bans on SO. I have seen a number of comments where the OP indicates they can't ask questions anymore on SO.

• We want to maintain site quality. Programmers has one of the highest answered rates (98%) for the Technology sites. But at an average of 43 questions per day, it's easy for us to fall behind.

• It's rare for our close review queue to be completely empty. While we don't have the challenges of the SO close queue, I think that for smaller sites having a backlog in the close review queue is not a good thing. A backlog indicates that new users aren't getting the feedback they need in a timely fashion.

How many?
For the sake of consistency, I would suggest an additional 26 (total 50) so it matches what SO allows.

From the help page on close privileges

You may cast up to 24 close votes per day (50 on Stack Overflow).

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• Option A:
  Give all 10k users additional ### close votes

• Option B:
  Give 10k users ###/2 close votes
  Give 20k users ###/2 close votes

• Option C: Tie votes into close queue activity (ie. +## at 250 reviews; +## at 1k reviews) along with a tie into reputation levels.

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Why not open this for everyone?
Once you've earned 10k on Programmers, you should have a good feel for the site dynamics and be active in self-moderation. That's why we allow vote-to-delete at 10k+. Adding more close votes recognizes the commitment that's been made and allows those users to continue shaping the site's culture.

Won't this lead to more questions showing up as on-hold?
Perhaps it will, but that only indicates we have been letting those new users down. Questions are put on-hold because they don't meet the site's criteria for high quality Q&A. With established users frequently running out of close votes on a daily basis, new questions that should be put on-hold are slipping through the cracks. Putting a poor question on-hold encourages the OP to revise the question; get the real answer they needed; and provide meaningful Q&A for the site.

Answer 1

I'm not totally opposed to looking into upping the limits here, but I want to run some data first. However, there's two things at play here that we need to deal with separately, while at the same time not forgetting that they're symptoms of a whole.

Let's go by each problem, on its own.

Q-blocked users trying their luck here

This is a growing problem that illustrates just how imperfect the question block system really is. While it does the job well enough, people end up deleting and re-creating accounts, going to sites where their questions are at best tangentially related to the topic, or hooking up with voting rings to get their blocked accounts unblocked for a short time.

For now, this needs flagging, not just close votes. We need to make the system better and it's something on my list to do, it shouldn't be such a manual process to police in these cases. However, if you see someone that is very likely unable to ask questions on one site bringing the same poor quality here - flag it. Your mods can and will get me or other members of the community team involved in slowing these people down over the network.

More close votes would help, but I'd much rather fix the underlying flaws.

An increase in poor quality questions

Traffic is growing here. I was just looking at stats to determine if the rise is coming from folks with more engineering related searches, or the old 'best book to learn books' kind of thing. It's a bit of a split, but looks like it's landing firmly in topics we actually want, which is good. That means the right kinds of users are finding the site.

It also means that we're getting more clueless folks tripping over us in search results. While this has been becoming increasingly evident to folks that use and review the site daily, it's .. now .. being evidenced a bit more by stats and data. Programmers is far from the size of 'Bedford Falls', it's a city, and it's growing. We want to make sure you're equipped to deal with bigger city problems as they present, but I'd like to observe this for just a little while longer before proposing the changes to the team.

I'm marking this as deferred, for now, but it's not in any way forgotten - It'll take a day or two to refine some queries, at which point I'm going to start watching it.

Answer 2

Request for stats to take a glance at (yea, this might be another question, but its directly pertaining to this one and maybe getting a glimpse into the "running some data first").

• Questions closed per hour on the site
  • Three or more community close votes
  • Two or fewer community close votes (mods step in)
• Number of outstanding review tasks
• For the people who have cast more than 25 (5/work day) close votes over the course of the week
  • Sum of remaining close votes available to this pool of people
• For people who have cast more than 100 (20/work day) close votes over the course of the week
  • Sum of remaining close votes available to this pool of people

The graph should be for 24 hours for work days (a separate one for weekends wouldn't be bad, but thats not when things happen much or are too interesting for draining the close vote pool).

The information that I'm trying to glean from this is about how fast are people using up their close votes in various ways (trying to handle the queue) and when is it necessary for mods to start picking up the poor question closes that come in (because the close vote pool is drained). It would also give a hint as to how much increasing the close count for people would help, or if it would be more useful to have additional moderators who can rapidly cast close votes (though noting that this has the side effect of some decrying the 'categorical mod closings').

To this end, it might be helpful and/or interesting for this information to be 'live' while a community manager capable of identifying bad questions (and closing them) on P.SE is able to look at the activity over the activity for a week to help with either guidance as to help prevent these questions from getting asked in the first place, or looking at ways to encourage people who are less active in community moderation to partake in it too. (being able to look at a question and say, "why isn't that getting closed? Oh, of the people that cast 20 votes/day, only 2 of them have any votes left")

Answer 3

According to the data, of 464 users who can vote to close, 35 have hit the limit at least once:

days 
---- 
583  
488  
176  
68
31    
27   
21  
13 
12   
10   
10
...  

(35 row(s) returned)

For reference, 19 of those users have at least 10k reputation as of today.

Just two users have run out of close votes 1,071 times compared to 553 for the field. On Stack Overflow, 3787 separate users have hit at least 24 close votes in a day. Looking the other sites, there just aren't any that have such a small number of users who 24 close votes in a day so frequently:

Users  Days Site
-----  ---- ----
 3787 65564 Stack Overflow
  111  1391 Mathematics
  108  2836 Ubuntu
   59   999 Server Fault
   35  1624 Programmers
   33   313 English Language and Usage
   26    98 Meta Stack Exchange
   22   279 WordPress
   19   187 Magento
   16    43 Android Enthusiasts
   15    17 Gaming
   13    87 TeX - LaTeX

Raising the limit on Programmers would reduce the odds these users hit the limit, but I don't know if that would really help get bad questions closed faster.

Finally, if we were going to increase the limit, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to just raise it for 10k users. From a very practical standpoint, changing it for everyone is a site setting, but changing it for users over 10k would require a code change. For another, the setting has already been raised to 50 for 3k+ users on SO, Math, Super User, Ubuntu, and Server Fault without any particular problems. I'd suggest removing that portion of the feature request that needlessly confuses matters.

Answer 4

Because the single anecdote proves the rule, right?
I'm adding this answer to show how failing to close bad questions quickly impacts new visitors to the site and gives them a bad impression.

This gem of a question "https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/233104/53019" triggered this answer.

And it occurred on an afternoon when many of the regular reviewers were out of close votes for the day as hinted at in this chat comment

Now, there's nothing horrifically wrong about the question that's asked. But it is off-topic and it's not a good fit for the site. That type of question occurs often enough that we have a meta post explaining why it was closed.

The problem is that the person answering the bad question didn't realize they were walking into a trap. Their answer was down voted and they reacted negatively to comments that were left trying to clarify what happened.

 

And the user is new to the site, having joined only 6 days ago.

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While it appears everything worked out well in this case since iCobot wasn't too rattled by the interaction, I think this occurs more often than we realize. If so, then we are losing otherwise valuable contributors because of a bad interaction from seeing bad questions that weren't closed off quickly.

Hopefully that puts a real example behind the site quality reasons justifying this request.

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And for additional perspective, here's a screenshot of the 10k tools from today looking at questions needing review / close votes.

 

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As further proof of the confusion caused by not getting questions closed quickly, the comment thread has continued into the next day.