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Question

What are the commonest checkmating moves in the Lichess (or similar) database? has been closed by 2 people.

How is it that 2 people are sufficient to close a question, while 5 are required to reopen it? We have 2 people who have voted to reopen it. Not to mention the 6 people who upvoted the question and 6 people who upvoted the answer (an excellent one by a relative newcomer). Counting the question and the answer itself, the total of 1+1+2+6+6=16 positive opinions expressed are insufficient to outweigh the 2 unexplained votes that closed this.

Also the reopen button only appears after the post has been closed. So the 5 people required to reopen can only begin to vote by coming back later.

Note also that there is no suggestion given by the two casual closers how it might be refocused. They merely click a button to invalidate all the hard work by questioner and answerer. In my opinion this is a naturally multi-faceted question, with a single scope (focus). It's really fine.

Stackexchange has, accurately in my opinion, a reputation for toxic behaviour, and I will continue to hold to account those who in my opinion are behaving badly.

So what to do?

Firstly, let this question be immediately re-opened, and kept open until 5+ people have voted for its closure.

Secondly, let's make sure that all questions can only be closed if 5+ people vote for it. If 5 people vote for closure, that is more likely to be an appropriate decision.

If these mechanisms don't work, then something more radical may be required. For example, re-open votes can directly count against close votes, and if the number drops to a low enough threshold, the question will be reopened automatically.

Thanks for your time.

EDIT: I see that that, rather than engage here in Meta on the general principle and fixing the broader problem, one of the closers has chosen unilaterally to edit the question to reduce the scope, and apparently reopened it. No consultation with OP, no explanation and no apology.

I'm glad the question has been reopened, although in my opinion, the original scope (essentially examining extreme frequencies of final moves) was fine, as it requires the same kind of analysis.

The broader question remains: how to correct (or avoid altogether) inappropriate closures by very small numbers of votes?

Answer 1

Questions are closed when they get 5 "ordinary" close votes or 1 moderator. Reopening uses the same standard. As it happens, both the close and the reopen on this one were done by a moderator before the count got to 5.

I personally feel like this is fine the way it is. IMO it would be ridiculous for a moderator to not be able to close questions, especially with the rash of incomprehensible posts by a certain person we've had lately.

Answer 2

I apologize to the OP and to @SteveBennett for the delayed response.

TL;DR: I immediately upvoted the question when I first saw it. I also cast a close vote initially because of the dual request for both "commonest" and "rarest." This was a mistake as (1) the question is good (I upvoted it) and (2) the two ideas are very strongly linked. Any good answer to one subquestion could easily respond to the other subquestion as well.

I didn't comment out of habit from SO where comments to help tend to attract revenge downvotes in my experiences. In this case, and in this smaller Chess.SE community, that was probably a mistake in judgement on my part. I am glad to see the Chess.SE community corrected my mistake and reopened this very good question.

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Q: "How is it that 2 people are sufficient to close a question, while 5 are required to reopen it?"
Comment: "I believe you were one of the two persons who together unilaterally closed this question."

My misguided close vote did not close the post. Simply put, one of the close voters was a moderator (post timeline). As @AntonMenshov points out, a mod close vote is sufficient to close the post; see Add a way for moderators to cast a normal, non binding close/open vote from the UberMeta.

With respect to

• "I will continue to hold to account those who in my opinion are behaving badly."
• "Posting an unexplained close vote is absolutely toxic behaviour - the default text is insufficient" (comment).

In retrospect, I think the original question is fine since the two subquestions ("commonest" and "rarest") are so strongly linked that any good answer could easily respond to both subquestions quite well. However, I am not sure words like "toxic" and "behaving badly" apply here. I acted in good faith and I admit a mistake here, but there was no malice.

Answer 3

Just an idea - spam/abusive/copy/... question (anything that can't be healed) can still be closed by 1 mod vote, whereas for unfocused/subjective/... (better edit than close) questions a mod vote counts the same as a "normal".