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Migration of MSO links to MSE links

Since most of the questions quoted by you are "fixed" now, I would conclude that the part of the community which is reading the Meta agrees with you on the problem of excessive use of OT-close-votes.

As for the reasons, I would blame the review system. The "Close votes" part of it for example offers options to "Leave open", "Close" or "Skip" where the counterweight to a close vote is rather weak (i.e. the "Leave open" votes are not counted to neutralize close votes), so closing questions is just made too easy. Once closed, the questions typically disappear from the front page rather quickly and unless the original poster (or you) complain on meta, are not looked at any more.

Changes to the close vote and/or review system might mitigate this issue and suggestions have been discussed on meta.SO, even years ago, and changes seem to have been implemented as Shog9 states in his answer:

  • Voting against closing does not override anyone's close vote. However, a sufficient number of "Do Not Close" responses (currently 3) will kick the question out of the review queue and start aging the close votes - regardless of how many views the question has had.

I suppose we should simply make more use of this feature and see how it is working out. Other than that, Shog9 has a non-technical suggestion of dealing with the problem, although I would doubt its efficacy:

  • If you see a question being closed that shouldn't be, leave a comment expressing your rationale. Make it constructive - "I like this question, therefore it should stay, close-voters are stupid" accomplishes little.

And of course the reference to the moderator activity which I would argue against - moderators should not step in for every simple disagreement on whether to close or not to close / migrate a question:

  • If you see a good, on-topic question in danger of being migrated, flag it - a moderator can always step in to prevent the migration.
the-wabbit
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