<p>I've just noticed this Meta post, <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/364007/280335">Testing three-vote close and reopen on 13 network sites</a> and I wondered whether we should employ it here, and what do other people think?</p>
<p>We are a smallish site, with a smallish number of active users (although it isn't <em>that</em> small, and is slowly growing over time, it should be noted). We don't have a problem with review queues building up <em>except</em> with the close votes. Some questions do seem to hang around for a while in the close queue.</p>
<p>The problem with the close vote review queue requiring 5 votes when there is a <em>limited</em> number of active reviewers (where two of which are moderators) is this: If a moderator votes, then the question is automatically closed, even if there aren't 5 votes - if a moderator casts the first vote to close then the question is closed straight away, without waiting for another four votes - so the vote is not democratic, but instead, dictatorial in nature. As such, moderators tend to not vote, unless the question blatantly needs closing (i.e. spam, vulgarity, etc.).</p>
<p>There are ways around this problem:</p>
<ul>
<li>sock puppets (moderators have a fake account to cast votes only in the review queue), or;</li>
<li>waiting for four votes and then a moderator casting the fifth vote (or waiting for three votes and then moderators agreeing (behind the scenes) to cast the final two votes, etc.)</li>
</ul>
<p>However, these aren't ideal, and just shortening the queue might make things better. This need not be a permanent change, I guess, so if this site, for some reason, eventually exploded in popularity, the review queue <em>could</em> go back to five votes (but I'm not 100 % sure about that, see the SE.Meta post above to check).</p>
<p>So... should SE.3DP jump on the &quot;three votes to close&quot; train? Or are things OK as they are? What do other users think? <em>Please</em> leave a comment or answer.</p>
<p>To make things super simple, and if you don't have time to write a comment or answer, you can just vote on the <strong>Yes</strong> answer or the <strong>No</strong> answer.</p>
<h3>End of voting date</h3>
<p>To give this vote an end point, and not make it so opened-ended, I guess we should tally a &quot;final&quot; vote on the 1<sup>st</sup> July 2021 - which is May 6 (trial start date) plus 45 days (length of trial) plus a little bit more. As we can't join the trial halfway through, there isn't much point to tallying up the votes before that.</p>
<p>At that point Catija will be sent the results.</p>

[{'answer_id': 520, 'author': 'Greenonline', 'author_id': 4762, 'author_profile': 'https://3dprinting.meta.stackexchange.com/users/4762', 'pm_score': 3, 'selected': False, 'text': '<h2>Yes, we should have a <em>three</em> vote close question review queue</h2>\n'}, {'answer_id': 521, 'author': 'Greenonline', 'author_id': 4762, 'author_profile': 'https://3dprinting.meta.stackexchange.com/users/4762', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': '<h2>No, we should stay with the <em>five</em> vote close question review queue</h2>\n'}, {'answer_id': 552, 'author': 'JNat', 'author_id': 13, 'author_profile': 'https://3dprinting.meta.stackexchange.com/users/13', 'pm_score': 3, 'selected': True, 'text': '<p>It\'s been almost a whole year since this was escalated this to the Community Team, so I apologize for the delay in actually processing the request! But the good news is <strong>you now officially only need 3 close votes to close a question on 3D Printing SE!</strong></p>\n<p>After looking at the data, I think it\'s clear that there\'s no reason for y\'all to have this set at 5. Thank you so much for bearing with us while we got to this request.</p>\n<p>We\'ll check back in with you all in a few months to see how things are going — if things are going great, we may not post an update but please feel free to leave a comment if you want us to post something.</p>\n<p>Here\'s some basic stats of how things look:</p>\n<p>Over the last two years, you\'ve had heavy fluctuations in effectiveness, when looking into what percentage of questions that received at least one flag or vote to close actually ended up getting closed. As you can see, the effectiveness is in the 60%~100% range — the good news is that the numbers of posts this represents are relatively small (always under 20 posts per month).</p>\n\n<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/iT5UH.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/iT5UH.png" alt="Graph showing the percentage of handled tasks, as described in the paragraph above" /></a></p>\n<p>The graph below, however, does show something that is a bit more concerning:</p>\n\n<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/922SP.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/922SP.png" alt="Graph showing all closed posts, posts closed by the community, and posts closed by the moderation team. The line representing posts closed by the moderation team matches the line of all closed posts on almost all of the reporting period" /></a></p>\n<p>This shows that the moderation team is doing the bulk of the closing, which can be problematic because the mods shouldn\'t be making these decisions on their own, even with other users weighing in. To add a bit more nuance, though, it looks like the moderation is not <em>single-handedly</em> closing the posts, but rather stepping in to aid the community on a big chunk of cases — the graph below shows which vote the moderators cast, to close posts:</p>\n<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/6DeBm.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/6DeBm.png" alt="Graph showing the amount of times mods cast the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 5th vote to close questions on the site" /></a></p>\n<p>When working on this project, Catija had found two primary use cases for this change:</p>\n<ol>\n<li>When too many items are going unhandled (not unclosed, just unhandled)</li>\n<li>When the moderators are doing the bulk of the closing/reopening.</li>\n</ol>\n<p>Because the mods here are casting the bulk of the final close votes, the first graph looks good (at least in the months where 100% effectiveness is reached). However, this creates an imbalance between closing and reopening as the mods now have to be really thoughtful about reviewing for reopening.</p>\n<p>So, my hope is that changing this to three votes to close/reopen will take some of the workload off the mods and also increase the number of posts that find their way to be reopened - assuming it\'s worth reopening them!</p>\n'}]
['https://3dprinting.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/519', 'https://3dprinting.meta.stackexchange.com', 'https://3dprinting.meta.stackexchange.com/users/4762/']