Twice now I've seen 200_success re-open a question that was closed with the question receiving little to minimum edits between being closed and then re-opened. It doesn't necessarily bother me that he believes these questions should be open.

In one case, he re-opened that was vote-to-closed by 5 non-mods. I took objection to the close reason, and after posting a meta question explaining why the question actually should be closed, he did finally agree with my reasoning and re-close the question. Here's the meta question from me and here's the original question.

Now, he has re-opened a question that was closed by another moderator. I'm not going to post a meta post about that particular question, because I was on the fence about whether that question should be closed or not--I don't have strong feelings either way. Here's the original question and here's its edit/close history.

What bothers me isn't that he is re-opening questions. What bothers me is that either the community voted on an open/close action or a moderator decided on an open/close action, and without explaining himself to those who made the original decision either in the comments or on the meta, he overruled the decision of those who made the original decision--despite no significant edits being made. In the first example I provided, there were no edits. In the second example, the only edit between being closed and being opened were two edits to the title--but changing a title doesn't change the question.

So in both cases, 200_success's actions said "You 5 who voted to close this question were wrong." and "You moderator who closed this question was wrong."

I'm not even saying that he's wrong to say those things. Some times questions get undeservedly close-voted and sometimes moderators make mistakes. The problem here is that 200_success's actions told people they were wrong and yet he made no effort to explain to those who were wrong why they were wrong. And in the first example, 200_success ended up admitting that he was wrong and the original action was correct, so the question was closed-reopened-closed... and the reopening could have been avoided had 200_success just had a conversation about it on the meta.

The CodeReview community is relatively small. If there are users with these powers (vote-to-close or moderator) powers, it is important that we point out to them when they've used them incorrectly so we can correct the behavior and avoid questions being closed incorrectly in the future.

Moreover, with the community being so small, that makes reopening questions that much more dangerous. You can not vote to close on a question more than once. If you cancel your vote to close or your vote to close succeeded and the question is later re-opened, you are never allowed to vote to close that question again, no matter how it is edited. When a moderator unilaterally reverts a close vote from 5 users, he should be very careful in doing so because he has eliminated their ability to close it again.

Basically, the gist of this is, we should be having discussions on the meta before overturning a close vote on a question that has received no edits since the close vote, right? At the barest of minimums, the re-opening moderator needs to leave a comment on the question explaining why the close reason voted on doesn't apply to the question.

And remember, people who vote to close can also vote to reopen.