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It is my impression that across the Stack Exchange ecosystem, moderators are exercising greater restraint in closing questions. Remember, moderators cannot "vote to close", once they click on "close" the question immediately changes to "on hold" status. This becomes "closed" a week later automatically if nothing happens, but new answers are prevented from being posted immediately.

To us veterans, having one of our comments deleted or a question closed is old hat. But to newbies, it can feel wrenching. We've just had a new GLU member close out their account after half a dozen questions. While they did not explain their decision, it's possible that having their question closed by a moderator after only one user had voted to close was the cause.

What's the rush? Except in cases of urgency (spam, offensive, utter nonsense) let the community handle it. If the question is not acceptable as is, comment with helpful advice and wait for five ordinary users to VTC (vote to close).

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  • why is there a downvote... I don't get it
    – Emanuel
    Commented Jul 13, 2013 at 22:54
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    @Emanuel: This is a Meta site. Downvote on Meta = “don’t agree”.
    – chirlu
    Commented Jul 15, 2013 at 11:55
  • That's why I floated a proposal for "three" or "four" vote moderators. That is a moderator can't unilaterally close a post, but can do so after one (or two) community members had voted to do so, meaning that the mod (by virtue of greater experience) gets "multiple" votes. Under this system, two mods would be able to close anything, but not not one.
    – Tom Au
    Commented Aug 2, 2013 at 13:10

2 Answers 2

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This was the post we are talking about:

We asked the OP for further clarification first as it was rather unclear what they asked. Before we heard anything further an edit to the question title was made which turned it to something else (original question title was "Are these correct"). Answers we already had did now look rather off topic.

Consequently the question was correctly flagged for putting on hold. We asked the OP again for clarification but sadly this did never happen.

We do not know why the OP decided to close their account but it may also be that they were not too happy with their question being so radically edited.

Only one other question from user 3097 was correctly closed as dupe with 4 community close votes and mine.

Please do not hesitate to name further examples where you felt a "premature" moderator action took place. I would be more than happy to discuss the matter and help clarifying all issues, be it here or in chat.

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This particular question was bothering me from the first moment it appears. I gave a lot of hints but OP didn't respond appropriately. He only asked for "being cut some slack". In my next comment I tried again to make clear he had to edit this question. He never responded any more.

Until then, there was only my close-vote. After your edit (which I consider as wrong, otherwise OP had responded to the existing answers in a different way), I flagged the question so that mods will have a look at this sooner rather than later.

This is my flag comment:

This question should be put on hold. It's absolutely not clear what is being asked. I don't agree with the recent changes, because I think the initial problem of OP were different. It's not possible to give a good answer to this question as long we don't know what's exactly OP's problem.

Fortunately, @Takkat responded very quickly. He put the question on hold, and he also left a comment in order to motivate OP to, eventually, edit his question.

He had enough time to do so. Just the fact he didn't do tells me that is was absolutely right to approach it like we did.

And I'm glad the questions has been deleted because it does not add any value to this site.

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