"Leave open" votes

Question

In the close votes review queue we are able to select "leave open". What does that really do? Does it counter one of the close votes or is it just a "feel good" option? If it actually does something why don't we have the same option from the regular question screen?

The reason I'm asking this is mainly because I've just come across this question, which currently has 3 close votes. I'll run out of my 20 daily reviews before I reach that one in the queue but would like to cast a "leave open" vote on it.

As far as I can tell, the particular question appears to be heading towards closed simply because it's posted by a dev. I could never be accused of being soft on devs but I really do feel that it's a perfectly valid question that many others, me included, have pondered in the past. As such it doesn't deserve to be closed.

Answer 1

Enough "Leave Open"/"Do Not Close" votes boot a question out of the Vote To Close queue, and start the aging process on close votes.
Currently the magic number for "enough" seems to be 3.

Answer 2

I don't know how many questions you see in the close vote queue... I assume that since the queue is small now, we're all essentially seeing the same questions in there.

If so, then there aren't that many questions in the queue (I see 18 right now, having recently reviewed 10). So one way you could cast a keep-open vote is that if you get to 19 reviews and haven't seen the one you want, just pick "Skip" from that point on until you get the question you want to cast a "keep open" vote for.

With so many reviewers keeping the queue short, any close-worthy questions that you skip will likely still get closed in due course.

One caveat: I've noticed it takes a long time for a question with one close vote to show up in the queue. A couple times in the past, I've given up checking after an hour.