We have, as everyone I am sure agrees, a great surplus of questions which beg closure. Perhaps the criteria becoming more well-defined is the cause of this. Or, perhaps it is that our influx of off-topic questions is greater than our intake of on-topic users with enough rep and motivation to go through content which is pretty much by definition uninteresting (if not eye-burning).
Personally, I've been burning through my quota of close votes every day lately, between the review queue and the sheer influx of questions like:
- https://serverfault.com/questions/519217/can-someone-help-me-convert-this-htaccess-to-nginx (give me t3h codez / do my job for me)
- https://serverfault.com/questions/518950/what-is-the-first-octet-in-the-external-network-destination-defined-by-bgp (complete nonsense)
- https://serverfault.com/questions/461136/failed-mysql-install-raspbian ("advanced" home users)
- https://serverfault.com/questions/518697/cherrypy-static-content-from-different-paths (software development)
- https://serverfault.com/questions/389108/whm-view-all-dns-records (how to cPanel)
This isn't exhaustive.
Also, as our library of answers grows, we have more and more questions that are duplicates to further exacerbate the problem.
Reopen votes seem rather rare (anecdotally, in the review queue I only see one that isn't the result of a spurious edit every few days, where I can easily hit the review cap on a day that all the spiky blue hedgehog-like moderation monsters are sleeping).
The goal, in my mind, of closing so many questions is to filter things down to topics that are actually interesting to the kinds of people who provide value to this community: people who are able to answer higher-level conceptual questions, make strong recommendations on the basis of experience, and fully analyze the causes of a problem. The kinds of questions in the bullet list above aren't engaging to these kinds of people, and endless duplicates (tautologically) get repetitive for people who have been here a while. It isn't a question of being hostile or forcing people to go away (and the new default close reasons should reflect this), but of keeping things on-topic and interesting.
I really wonder, given this, why the quota of review votes on this site remains at 24. I understand that at Stack Overflow it's set at 50.
It would be cool if we could try something a little bit different here. For instance, perhaps at reputation levels at 5000, 10000, 15000, and 20000, we could increase the quota a little (perhaps to 36, 42, 50, and unlimited, respectively). This would help protect against an excessive torrent of close votes while also not frustrating people who know what needs to be closed but hit their cap within a couple hours of signing in. Thoughts? Alternatives?
