I have question  I am sure this is valid question - I am not new on SO. It was closed no comments on the question. Given that the SO is here for a while - there are lot more users who can close questions (lot more than it was a year ago). Some users might not even understand the question but have power to close it. I think to prevent blatant actions - SO should implement a mandatory comment post if a user votes to close a question.
8379
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.
49907
I'm relatively new to Stack Overflow and already have experience with getting both a question and an answer deleted.  I understand why  was closed, but the closing happened too fast. The first time I looked at my question after posting it, it was already closed; I didn't get the chance to respond.  The deletion of  was done by mistake. The deleter wrote that I should have deleted the answer by myself to avoid bothering the moderators. That was offensive, IMO.  I suggest implementing a time period, e.g. one day, during which questions cannot be closed. That way, authors would have the chance to explain the causes of their answers.
55077
This has been , but a long time ago, and got closed for a rather confusing reason (converting comments to answers is not an "exact duplicate" of converting answers to comments), so I'm going to bring it up again.  I think it makes sense to have a user (not asker) option to convert a comment they posted on a question to an answer on the question, if it turns out it led to the asker figuring out the answer. We've all seen askers reply to comments with "@foo Hey, that was it! Post that as an answer and I'll accept it"; why not make it simple for the user to do that? It seems trivial to implement, and there's no formatting issues like there is going from answers to questions. I'm not sure how it could be "abused", because you need less rep to answer a question than to comment on it. I don't know if the answer's post time should be the time of the comment or the time it was converted; I think probably the latter. I also don't know if the comment should be deleted, left alone, or replaced with a link to the answer; again I think probably the last
59837
I have a situation where different users have asked questions and I answered them. The problem is not that they haven't accepted the answer which can tell me that it is correct or not. But they are actually not responsive and it seems to me that answer is being ignored. Or they asked the question just for the sake of asking.  See -the user was last seen yesterday, the same day it was answered.  -the user was last seen today.   which is also upvoted by a fellow user, but the OP is seen till days after it was answered and is not even commenting.  I went through a lot of question on meta on similar situation such as  where Anna says that it is completely voluntary for users to accept it.   But then again, I believe it is becoming a fashion, to ask a question read the answer as a suggestion and leave it.  It is discouraging me. I am not saying that my answers or suggestions are 100 percent working but I atleast need be told so I can improve it. And more importantly I am not the only one facing this.  Please advise.  EDIT : Well, I got a lot of suggestions from the answers and comments combined below and I have to say that I agree with what Cody Gray has to say and just keep on answering the questions, the returns(good or bad) may be now,later or never and just move on. However, in my own defence I would also say that I did not raised this question to pin point any user but a bad practice that I find worthy of discussing. Thanks.
13681
I asked  on the website. It was closed as being off-topic. The off-topic message says If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit your question or leave a comment. all of which I had done approximately 2 hours before the question was closed.  So I would like to know how do I ask the users who cast the vote to close the question after I had commented about the validity of the question about where else should I comment in order to fulfill the criterion regarding commenting in order to explain the question?
45842
Possible Duplicate:          I know that this issue has been raised a number of times in the past, with some improvements being made to reduce the negative impacts it has on discussion, but the problem persists, and I would like to suggest a further change.  I am aware that the need to preserve anonymity when voting is an important aspect of the design of the community, and that making comments mandatory on downvotes would negate that.  What I am suggesting is that downvotes, without comments, should cost the voter the same number of Rep Points as the owner of the Answer. So that, if I were to downvote another user's Answer, I would lose 2 Rep Pts as would they.  I know there is a small notification bubble which pops up suggesting the voter add a comment to explain the vote, but it seems that is not encouraging alot of users to do so. If the same bubble basically illustrated a reward for the voter in adding a comment "If you add a comment, explaining your vote, you will gain 1 Rep Pt." there may be a greater engagement for people to do so.  (Yes, I am raising this as I have had 2 downvotes - and no other actions on my answers - in the last 48 hours with no comments, no explanations and no ideas why they did so. But I still think there is merit in this idea all the same.)
37402
I am relatively new to SO and see this very often. As the title suggests there are many questions that are answered in comments itself and they remain unanswered forever. Shouldn't there be an option to mark a comment as an answer and the comment is copied over as an answer or something like that?  I guess there should be an option to the creator of the question to do this.
18885
I am posting this question just to get a better understanding of the questions that can be asked on Stack Overflow.  I find that  can several answers based on users opinion and cause a discussion.  Why is this a good question when several other requests for books and tutorials are not acceptable?
44421
What happened to the close vote option for posts that describe an error or unexpected result but don't include the relevant code or any code!? This is on of the two most popular I use.. What am I supposed to do about questions like  now!?  I just also noticed "must show minimal understanding" is missing as well. After reading over the new option again, I am supposing that the intention is to use "not likely to be helpful for future viewers" for both of these?
35712
I've found strange behavior when closing this  - I definitely see that there are 3 closing votes and 2 of them are at "Off-topic" section:   -but there are no explanations on section itself:   -while, normally, it's expected that it will appear. In custom comments section there are also no closing-votes displayed.   Perhaps it's just my browser (which is FF 26 x64 under Win) - so marking this as a "possible bug". Thank you for your attention.
78462
I think moderators should have the ability to cast a normal, non binding close and open vote like they were a normal user (while of course retaining their ability to cast a binding vote where necessary). This can be used in &quot;grey areas&quot; where a moderator can choose to give his or her opinion, but not make a decision alone; a good example of this is . This also helps in areas not so grey (questions that everyone would agree should be closed) since the OP has the time to see close (1) and possibly edit his or her question. The moderator can then optionally come back after a few minutes and close it for real if it's not improved (or maybe during that time other 4 people voted to close it). This would also fit perfectly in :  Since we’re about to add community moderators on both Stack Overflow and Server Fault, I need to document what it is, exactly, we expect moderators to do. The short answer is, as little as possible!
18545
I was just reading , i.e., stop moderation and similar type duties, for some period of time to get the attention of the SE staff. It was only on the site for a few minutes, and I was just about finished reading it, when it was deleted. I assume the OP didn't delete it, so I suspect it was likely done by a moderator. I realize having somebody ask other people to take such actions would not be appreciated by SE, but I don't believe such censorship is warranted. As far as I know (but I'm not an expert), it didn't break any rules here.  I have seen from various recent posts and answers there's a lot of confusion, frustration and anger here, with people going to reduce or stop various moderation type activities regardless of whether or not any posts explicitly asking people to take such actions are removed. Actually, I would not be surprised if this post will also be removed just for me asking about it.
1851
That question of mine was closed a long time ago (relatively, to me at least).  However, from time to time I still get downvotes for it.  That got me thinking: is there any reason to still downvote closed questions?
74954
The  shows low quality questions and answers.  When out of close votes I'm not sure what to do with the questions. I can still handle the answers fine as there are no limits on the actions I can take.  But for questions one of the actions (close) requires close votes. Sure, I say ok or skip but without the ability to vote for close the process feels a little pointless as I don't have a tool to say "this is bad" anymore and I'm "wasting" time skipping bad things.  Also I'm not sure how the "not sure" votes are recorded and if that degrades the quality of some collected stats when I repeated skip questions that are clearly bad.  One suggestion might be to not show low quality questions to people that are out of close votes.    Some days later: Now that the initial batch of "low quality posts" are done this might not be that big of an issue any more. Even so it happened to me again that I was out of close votes and got a low quality question that I couldn't do anything about.  Another solution might be to allow the casting of a "should be closed" suggestion just to drive down the questions score a little (i.e. counteracting "looks ok" votes) instead of showing the, unusable, option to close.
85639
One of the main arguments against keeping old, fun posts in a locked state is that they create broken windows, which serve as an advertisement for the types of questions which are acceptable—notwithstanding the historical notice stating the opposite. I've never found that argument convincing, but I certainly wouldn't want to encourage behavior that makes Stack Overflow worse, so I'd honestly, sincerely, without any trolling like to ask those that do believe this to drop the hammer on me.   If this claim is true, I would expect Meta to be rife with posts from indignant users claiming that their question was closed, while that "weird programming feature" question over there exists. I would think coming up with about two dozen such meta posts from the last 6 months would be trivial; surely this problem is big enough to manifest itself at least once per week.  To be clear, I've seen Meta pages filled with posts containing "why question closed". I know plenty of questions get closed, and plenty of people complain. I'm talking about people specifically complaining that "old junk exists, so my new junk should, too".   Finally, let's not waste time digging through all the closed Stack Overflow questions looking for stuff that seems similar to these purported broken windows. There are tons of junk questions that come into the front door of Stack Overflow every day. This junk comes in many flavors: here's a wall of code, now find my error; here are my program requirements, now someone write it; spam; and, of course, non-constructive crap that might look similar to some of the old favorites. But just because some old junk questions exist, and some new junk questions get asked, doesn't mean the former caused the latter—post hoc ergo propter hoc.  No more rhetoric, no more arguments, no more anger. Just data.     EDIT  There's been a bit of confusion as to what I'm asking above, and it seems I could have been a bit clearer. A lot of answers and comments below deal with open questions on Stack Overflow and Programmers.SE creating broken windows, with one answer even quoting me to show how keeping questions open and active can create broken windows. The people writing these answers are correct; keeping off-topic questions open and active does indeed cause these problems.  This question is intended to ask whether broken windows would be created by keeping questions like the  closed and locked, delisted from "top question" pages, and with a big bright prominent banner proclaiming to all that the question exists for historical purposes only, and is not a good example of an on-topic question.  So the bottom line is, I was wondering just how many meta threads there were asking "why can't I ask X when Y exists" Where Y was locked at the time of asking (which would likely be reflected in the answers).
29592
Even though a question may be closed by receiving 5 close votes, the votes do not necessarily need to agree.  I think this is a good behavior, but  (which it was) and found the question was closed as "not a real question".  This is unfortunate, while I'm happy to display my username and acknowledge that I voted to close, I'd like some additional transparency.  That is, if it was a 4-1 vote for "not a real question" vs "exact duplicate" I'd be interested in seeing that level of information.  The point is to be transparent about why the question was closed, and though 5 users may agree the question needs to be closed they may not agree why.  It's important to recognize all the reasons for closure, not just the majority reason.  I'd suggest displaying this information as something like:     closed on Jun 21 at 4:26 as:         not a real question by foo, bar, baz   exact duplicate by alice, bob      Once a question has been closed I'd argue it's more important to understand the rationale than it is to worry about an extra 2 lines of text. If the votes are 2,1,1,1 perhaps keep just 2 bullets, the first showing the majority vote, the second saying "for other reasons" as a summary of the change.  The point is to aggregate the summary by reason.
37965
Although  is obviously an exceptionally poor question, it still amazes me that 5 people can vote to close and yet not one of them leave a comment to help explain how the poster can improve their question.  I see loads of similar examples where questions from new users are closed and heavily voted down without anyone taking any effort to explain why - not a pleasant experience for new users.  Is there anything that can be done to encourage users to leave comments when voting to close?