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I am "constantly" running out of closevotes. It used to happen just once or twice a month, but I've now I've hit it for the second time in a week. To be clear, I am referring not just to running out of reviews, but total closevotes; I run through not only the close vote review queue as far as I can go, but also can't vote to close questions I encounter in the low-quality queue or from organic browsing.

I have been searching and searching MSE and MSO on the basis for the limit, which is theorized to be an anti-bot in purpose. I can't locate a definitive question, just complaints that the limit should be raised.

I do see references to SO having a limit of 40 or 50 closevotes, rather than 20. This may be a special exception for SO, since their review queue numbers in the thousands rather than the low hundreds, but if this limit can be adjusted, I'd like to petition for it for EL&U as well. While our queue is smaller, we also have correspondingly fewer reviewers, and while we have very diligent moderators, during holiday periods the number of pending reviews still grows noticeably.

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    Only the diligent hit these limits. I reckon a higher close-vote limit should be granted to any trusted user (20k rep) who asks for it.
    – Lawrence
    Commented Jan 18, 2019 at 16:08
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    What about trying to fix potentially good LQQs rather than simply and passively CV?
    – user 66974
    Commented Jan 18, 2019 at 20:00
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    @user240918 If something is a duplicate, there is no "fixing" it. If something can be answered by checking a dictionary, there is no "fixing" it. Look at my edit history, my comment history, and my vote history before making presumptions about the effort I am putting into my votes, please.
    – choster
    Commented Jan 18, 2019 at 20:07
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    As a veteran user, what about putting a little of your effort into making questions. CV is a laudable activity, but we need more good material ELU users can work on. :)
    – user 66974
    Commented Jan 18, 2019 at 20:13
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    It is indeed possible to raise the limit, but only if there's a good reason to. MSE raised the limit at one point because there was a lot of off-topic questions being posted. Is anyone else hitting the close vote limit? I don't think I ever have (except on Stack Overflow and MSE).
    – Laurel Mod
    Commented Jan 18, 2019 at 23:24
  • @Laurel As Lawrence says, it’s almost guaranteed for people working the queues. I did regularly when I was more engaged in site moderation. It was a daily occurrence. The worst was when you used them all up in the queues, sometimes for months old Qs buried in the dust pile of history, and then had nothing left for a new hot load of ¢r@p that hit the front page.
    – Dan Bron
    Commented Jan 19, 2019 at 9:46
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    @user240918 Both noble sentiments, both somewhat idealistic. Most of the crud that hits the front page is irredeemable, even if interesting the questions are trivial or of zero interest to anyone but OP. And the cadre of Meta regulars is too small to maintain a sufficient baseline of interesting Qs, even if everyone were to dedicate himself to that task, as you and ML do. What we need is to turn away the crud, and attract a bigger audience of expert and professional English users.
    – Dan Bron
    Commented Jan 19, 2019 at 9:49
  • @DanBron - yes, and first of all, solicit the already existing expert audience to be more active on the questions side, or the front pages will be inevitably dominated by LQQs, however many CVs you may hold.
    – user 66974
    Commented Jan 19, 2019 at 9:56
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    @user240918 I mentioned that: at the current number of expert members — or more critically the ratio to non experts — LQQ dominance is a given regardless of their activity level. Notwithstanding any of this analysis, we should not wave trash lying around, and if the expert body wants to contribute by cleaning it up, we shouldn’t artificially limit how much trash they’re allowed to collect.
    – Dan Bron
    Commented Jan 19, 2019 at 10:02
  • @DanBron - as things stand now, the CVs against LQQs is a lost war. No matter how may LQQs you will CV, more will come. That’s my take.
    – user 66974
    Commented Jan 19, 2019 at 10:10
  • @user240918 I'd translate the the Italian "guerra persa" with "lost cause" or "losing battle". A lost war is understandable but it doesn't have exactly the same meaning.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Jan 19, 2019 at 14:18
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    @DanBron I used to try to be diligent: after a 5 month hiatus I found that I needed to lower the bar. Sad.
    – Cascabel_StandWithUkraine_
    Commented Jan 20, 2019 at 21:33

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Based upon Jeff Atwood's answer to Should Available Close Votes Be a Function of Inflation or Rep?, made in 2011, I surmise that the answer to the titular question is yes, it is possible. Sci-Fi and Super-User had 24 close votes back when the default number of close votes was 12, meaning that the number can be set on a per-site basis if nothing has changed since then, and based on the simplicity of his answer it seemed like all Jeff had to do was increase some values to make that the network-wide standard.

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    If it’s just going from 20 to 24, it’s probably not worth it. The CV queue on ELU Main is sitting at 120 currently and probably growing faster than it’s being pruned. There was a question some time ago about introducing new privileges past the 20k(?) rep. I don’t know whether the 25k rep access to site analytics came out of that, but an unlimited close votes privilege at 30k or even 50k might be worth considering.
    – Lawrence
    Commented Jan 19, 2019 at 17:54
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    We already have a limit of 24 close votes - 20 is the limit of the close vote queue.
    – curiousdannii
    Commented Jan 22, 2019 at 23:32
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I've seen many interesting and worthwhile questions closed. Closing a question punishes those who could answer it and deprives the questioner of advice. What if you're wrong? There is no legitimate purpose for this arrogance. If you're running out of close votes, it means the community needs protection from you. Stop voting to close.

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    This doesn't actually answer the question I asked.
    – choster
    Commented Jan 20, 2019 at 21:52
  • True. But it is obviously possible.
    – Greg Lee
    Commented Jan 20, 2019 at 21:54
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    Then work the same queues and vote to leave open. Don’t tell others how to spend their earned privileges.
    – Dan Bron
    Commented Jan 20, 2019 at 22:42
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    If you really cared about helping the community, you'd have voted more than 212 times, you'd have edited someone else's post (even once!), and you'd have found something to flag even once in your four years at this site. People like that are who this community needs protection from.
    – curiousdannii
    Commented Jan 22, 2019 at 23:33

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