Regarding Potential Duplicates: I saw , which got closed as a duplicate of , which in turn has an "accepted" answer, but doesn't answer the question (or, the answer was revoked). So, there still seems to be no thread keeping this issue open for continued discussion or waiting for a viable resolution. There may be other potential duplicates I may have missed, however.  Today wasn't the first time I failed an audit, wanting to learn more about why a question got VTC'ed. I've failed audits by accident before too, so I'm not too torn up about having failed(—although, as the person running the SO Close Votes Reviewers chat room, it'd be pretty ironic if I got banned from those reviews :-)—but I am uncomfortable that the current system fails an auditee who clicks a button which normally functions to display more information (not cast a vote). It's as if normally, it's a Close... button, and during an audit, it's a Close button—and that makes a difference.    Preempting those who'd say that one shouldn't need information about what others are doing to make their own judgment, . But, between (1) the bias that the lightbox might cause (which, we're supposed to trust users about, as answered in the linked question) and (2) penalizing the thoughtful and the curious for wanting to know more, I feel the greater evil is the latter. (Besides, why not just show no votes, as if it were a freshly flagged question? Or, if these are pulled from real examples, just show one of the votes that was originally cast.)  Precisely because I'm always skeptical of what I presently know, when I see something that doesn't make sense, I want to find out more. When I see a question that seems just fine, I instinctively click Close, hoping the subsequent lightbox might shed some light on things, or teach me something new:   Is there a more specialized site for this question that I haven't heard of? Is there some other, subtle reason I'm not yet aware of that this question should be closed? Was a code sample missing previously, but filled in later? If yes, then I want to see how many off-topic votes this question received, because if it has, say, 3 such votes, and the question seems useful, I'd comment, "This question has been improved and should no longer be closed for its initial reason," to fend off its impending doom. (It only takes one more user—tired and on autopilot—or predisposed to bandwagoning—out of all exposed to the question until the votes expire.) I think this is one of those questions asking about objective differences (not opinion-based) between the internal workings of two comparable "software tools commonly used by programmers," which is a valid question. But with the popularity nowadays of closing such questions as being about "a tool, library, or favorite off-site resource," I want to leave a comment explaining the difference to future reviewers. So let's see, how many people voted to close for that reason? (Or, was this question voted to close for something else entirely that I've missed?) I think there might be valid grounds for closing this question. But with the advent of so many new, long-descript close vote reasons, I need to go over them again to know for sure whether I'm doing the right thing.   And so on.  tl;dr  I use the lightbox to make many judgments about how to review a close vote, and especially whether to leave a comment and what if so. I think it's healthy that a user should attempt to investigate the context in which a question was VTC'ed. Alas the current system discourages that curiosity. I think it's inconsistent that the Close button should mean different things in practice, and during an audit.
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Having just  from any of the queues, it was reviewing close votes; however, this audit was flawed in that I didn't even cast a close vote.  Often I press the Close button to preview greater detail and sentiment of the closure, spawning the Why should this question be closed dialog box:    Especially for duplicates, where functionality is solely dependent on spawning this dialog.  From Closing > Duplicate, I can search or view selected duplicates:    Although, I realize general closure reasons are summarized on the page:    This question had 6-upvotes, but seemed very localized referencing subjective query is "taking too long" and even had a sqlfiddle link.  Maybe overly broad regarding performance tuning, the OP was posting like a forum with two answer posts to his own question  and  with one of those answers asking follow-up questions.    Wanting to gauge community response, current closure totals struck my curiosity.  So, I pressed the Close button and boom - oh, the humanity!  I failed, and didn't even cast a close vote.    Votes are not cast until a reason for closure is selected and Vote to Close is pressed.  Taking any review very seriously on this site, it only seems fair that my review quality is tested through actionable steps instead of clicking for more detailed information, leveraging the functional design of the close vote user interface.  Sure, it's complex to seed fake vote totals, and then there's controversy of mindless voting in the majority or people who simply cherry pick 4-vote questions.  Still though, it seems unfair I should hesitate to review further information of vote totals and duplicates before skipping due to the implementation of this audit.
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The story:   Question posted on Programmers (let's call it ), Same question posted on Code Review (let's call it ), I migrate Q1 to Code Review, Someone notices that Q1 is a duplicate of Q2 and votes to close, I notice the duplicate notice and the auto-generated comment and also try to vote to close, but can't. No error message, nothing, it just doesn't work.   And then I notice that Q2 no longer exists ("voluntarily removed by its author"). My guess is the OP also noticed the duplicate vote, realized how messy cross posts are and decided to be a good citizen and delete one of the two questions. He picked the wrong one though, and now we're left with a duplicate notice pointing to a non existent question and an unresponsive dialog.  It's a mess ;) A weird and rare mess, but still a mess. What can we do about it?
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Motivated by the deletion of     On one hand, I disagree with these closures, because:  These questions were (and still are) very popular They have some good information in them (or at least the first one does) and it feels like bad sportsmanship to remove good information from the internet, particularly when it was contributed by your fellow users  Number 2 in particular bothers me. A lot. On the other hand, I do agree that:  The community of 10k users should be able to decide which closed questions they wish to delete on their own without me intervening These questions should definitely remain closed, because they either have an absurd # of answers, or are duplicates (though some duplicates ). Which means they are eligible for deletion … forever. These questions wouldn't survive more than 10 minutes if asked today on Stack Overflow, so in some ways they are artifacts from the past, like dinosaurs in an era of mammals.  There is some related discussion in:   While I normally favor code solutions here, I am not sure I like the idea that once a question gets 400 upvotes it should become extremely difficult to delete. It feels like mob rule. Official policy on the blog:
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Today I have stumbled across a question that was closed . When reading this question , I thought it was valid, and I even might have an answer for it . So I went and read  and  along with some other related questions here on meta . The issue is that because :  I do NOT have 3000 points to vote for opening,  The said question is not my own ,  The person who closed it did not leave a comment, It seems that I have no option to reopen it and answer.   What one should do in that case ? Flag it for moderator ?  I would think this is not the appropriate action here . Contact the closer personally  ? - Same as Above (and also , how ?) Leaving a simple comment ? By reading the above mentioned questions - leaving a simple comment will do nothing by itself to reopen or to catch attention (unless someone else stumbles upon it ..) So what are my options for action ?? (the question is  for reference)
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Someone voted to close my question as a duplicate. I agreed, so I cast my close vote (I have enough reputation to vote to close).  . So I expected this to happen.  But it didn't. This confused me — is this not a question I asked after all? No, it is. Maybe I need to reload the page? Nope, the question still isn't closed. Is the asker confirmation feature broken? Well, there's the “This question may already have an answer here” banner at the top. What if I click “That solved my problem!”? Ah, that does close the question.  It turns out that only clicking “That solved my problem!” instantly closes the question. Casting a close vote has a different effect, it's just an ordinary close vote.  Please make casting a close vote equivalent to clicking “That solved my problem!”.
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Before you vote to close: there are a lot of questions with titles and/or bodies that are similar to this one. However, none of the ones I saw deal with this particular case.    I have an  that is appropriately closed as a duplicate of an FAQ entry. I just tried to delete it because it doesn't really add any useful search terms or overall value to MSO. I got the following message:     Sorry, this question has answers and cannot be deleted; flag it for moderator attention instead.   That's the same message that comes up when you try to delete your own unclosed answered questions. Since I'm a 10k user, I think the system should at least allow me to cast a regular, non-binding delete vote for that post, if not delete it unilaterally.  I also think that 20k users attempting to delete their own recently closed posts shouldn't have to wait through the 48-hour "possible reopening" period, but since my example question was closed over a year ago I don't know what the system actually does.
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Few arguments against it:   Pressing the flag button doesn't mean actually submitting it (as in every test/form). There might be an unknown duplicate, if you assume it's the first post (as you were told) it might be worthy to flag it. You might want to look if someone else thought it was duplicate by "making half way" to flagging it.   Why pressing the flag button makes you fail an audit? I think it shouldn't.  Edit:  The implementation difficulty (fake flagging UI) and the tips about how avoid failing (and reviewing!) by skipping the answer adds some insight, but still doesn't answer the question why it's not a valid review.    Moreover, I would like to add one more,  describes a reviewer that failed an audit while trying to flag a question as off topic. The question was clearly off topic, and still after 1300 views no one flagged it.
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In other words, should we now look at the content of the answers when we are evaluating questions for possible duplication?  Is it sufficient to say "Your answer can be found in this question over here, therefore your question is a duplicate?"  The new guidance is here:    Among other things, it describes the new close banner:     This question already has an answer here:   Link to the Duplicate Question   ... which seems to suggest that, if some other question in the system answers the OP's question, then the OP's question can be closed as a duplicate on that basis (even if the question itself is not necessarily duplicated).  Example Here:    Note the comments below the question, where I dispute the assertion made there that it is a duplicate question.  The original question doesn't mention unit testing.
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I just failed . This post looked good; very concise. However given that the question had 5 other answers, I thought the odds of this post being just a repeat of information in another answer was quite high.   I opened up the question, and the very first answer was the same as this one, word for word, and highly upvoted. Aha! I thought to myself, someone plagiarising for cheap rep. And I went to flag.  But as it turns out, the duplicate answers were one and the same, anonymised for the review.  I tried to have a think of ways to prevent this occurring, but I have to admit I'm drawing a bit of a blank. Does anyone else know of a way?   n.b.: I'm aware that a small amount of false positives as a price for catching more robo-reviewers is pretty reasonable, so if this isn't easily fixable I guess that's fine.
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I recently had a  which attracted 1 close vote. I don't know why this vote was cast. If I have not conformed to the site's protocol in any way I am left 'none the wiser'.    Should it be made mandatory for a user to comment on why they are voting to close a question?  If this site is to remain 'clean', part of this will be achieved incorporating processes that educate users.
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I was recently presented with  of an accepted answer that looked fine to me. Without any action on my side, the "I'm done" button was available. I assumed this was due to the answer being accepted (I haven't encountered this situation before) and I considered it worth clicking.     Fail.   So there are basically two bugs here:   the "I'm done" button shouldn't have been available since I didn't do anything Since I didn't downvote, flag or comment, the audit shouldn't have failed
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It looks like this issue has , but it just happened again on Travel.SE. Perhaps this is another corner case? These two questions are closed as duplicates of each other.           I had the last vote on each, although in both cases, my vote was for "Unclear what you're asking", but the weight of votes in both cases were for the duplicate status. So if the existing checks are only in place at the time someone casts a close vote, that would explain how this one got in under the radar. Perhaps another check needs to be done when the question is actually closed, not just when close votes are cast?  And as @gnat points out, low-rep/logged-out users get a Redirect loop when trying to load either question.  NOTE: A moderator has already fixed this particular circular duplicate situation by closing one of the questions with a different close reason.
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When a question received close votes for being a duplicate and one also casts a close vote for that reason, previously suggested duplicates can be selected.  That's convenient. The preview of the duplicate is expanded to show the entire question and all answers, which helps reviewing this possible duplicate.  The big amount of additionally displayed content pushes the submit button very far down. It's often sufficient to read the other question or a few answers to decide if it is indeed a duplicate.  All the convenience of being able to click on a previous suggestion is eliminated by the need to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the pop-up in order to click on the submit button.  Some possible solutions I could think of:   position the button near the top create multiple buttons and place one below the question and every answer move the button along when scrolling the window keep the height of the popup constant and let the content of the question expand in its own scrollable environment
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I have been through a few re-open requests and some shared a similar issue.  Like   It was originally closed as unclear. Then the OP changes the question but his edit still makes it a very poor question with no research shown and the answer could be as simple as yes or no - only if the question didn't get closed.  I judge looking at the new(revised) question ignoring the original closure reason. Even though the revised question still doesn't make a good question and would probably get closed very quickly I just leave it closed with the old closure reason.    Am I doing the right thing or should we re-open and let it get closed for a new - more appropriate reason?   The answer seems obvious: leave it closed, but    is this how all of you process re-open queue?   Note: I am asking because sometimes I've noticed others voting to re-open such cases and I want to confirm that I am on the same page as everyone else
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I just reviewed this:    But while reviewing, it already displays the "put on hold as not a real question" section, and it asked:     Should this question be closed as: ?   So as it stands, the audits are broken, since we already know that the question is "on hold" while reviewing, and it is incredibly hard to miss the huge grey box at the bottom.  Another with screenshot:
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Background: when I saw , it had 2 votes to close as duplicate, but it didn't have the usual automatically-generated comment. What happened was that  and deleted the automatic comment.  In this situation, when a second closer comes along and also decides to close as duplicate, a new comment should be generated. Otherwise the potential duplicate isn't visible until the question is closed, which often means wasted time as people redo the work of answering the question.
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As a newcomer to StackOverflow, I recently asked my first . I wanted to start with a fairly safe general question, to get the feel for how the site worked. My question was intended to be programming-related, but my original wording was not clear enough, so another user decided to close it.  I've re-phrased my question, and had received one useful answer before the question was closed, but I'm not sure what the procedure is after your question is closed to allow people to post answers again...  I've checked the FAQ and About pages, searched the SO questions, but have had no luck. Could someone point me in the right direction as to how I get my question re-opened, or if it is possible to do at all?