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Please do not waste your own time or that of others by perfunctorily closing historical questions on our site from the first few years of its existence, particularly those that were asked in good faith and answered in kind.

The character of our site has changed significantly over time in its traffic, its users, and its postings. Specifically, what we consider off-topic and our standards about how much research should be shown as a good-faith effort have changed.

Therefore perfunctory closure on historical questions does not improve the site: it harms it. Please do not do that. That content has helped a lot of people over the years (see scores and view counts), and we do not wish for it to be removed from our site.

A far better use of everyone’s time than looking for more things to close is looking for things to answer, where “answer” means to actually answer, not merely comment.

We see very little traffic these days: please do not shut people down so quickly.

Better to treat us like the low-traffic site that we have, in effect, become, and instead nurture every new question that shows up. Try to make it work if you possibly can. Edit questions to improve them. Answer, not comment, even if you don’t have all the references you might like to have. You or anybody else can always come back later and improve that answer that was initially somewhat sparse.

Remember that our site is intended to be a collaborative effort based on helping each other and others, helping them not only now but also in the future. So please try harder to work with newcomers, not against them.

And please cut some slack to our many vintage questions. Few if any merit deletion, which is the ultimate destiny of questions that get closed. If you really, really believe it should be closed and deleted despite high scores and views, please flag for moderator attention requesting an historical lock.

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    100% agree. Can we raise the number of votes to close new and old questions from three to five? No? Pretty please? Icing on top? … Commented May 19 at 13:08
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    Related Hey! People who like to close questions! Hey! Commented May 19 at 13:12
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    +10 With the advent of the age of AI, even a giant like Google Search is, or possibly might be soon, losing many visitors to ChatGPT. ELU and SE must adapt. Commented May 19 at 19:05
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    Is there an easy way to view deleted questions with upvoted answers? I posted years back this question: Deleted Upvoted and Popular Question: Why? Commented May 20 at 5:53
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    @Mari-LouA No, because even for 10k users a query like deleted:yes is:a score:5 gets an implicit user:me added to it unless you have a diamond. This is by design. Commented May 21 at 12:32
  • @Mari-LouA: I absolutely agree that the number of people needed to close a question should be increased. If not to 5, perhaps to 7. This site has for many years been closing too many questions; that began before the limit was lowered to 3. Commented May 28 at 0:49
  • @Cerberus-ReinstateMonica The thing is, it's easy to reverse idiot closures quickly before too much damage is done. If it goes back up to five, then it will make them much slower and harder to reopen, so that when they eventually are, they are effectively already dead. Commented May 30 at 8:27
  • @Araucaria-Him: I would argue the opposite: it is much harder to reopen questions, because new questions cannot be voted to be 'kept open'. And most people don't look at old questions after they are closed, so most people never see the closed questions and won't take the trouble. It is really hard to motivate people to carefully read and vote upon a question that is not new and has been closed already so probably won't be reopened ever. Commented May 30 at 17:26
  • @Cerberus-ReinstateMonica I'm well-known for my question reopen campaigns. It used to be a full-time hobby! (ask around on EL&U chat). I can tell you for sure that reopening questions is an awful lot easier now than it used to be! I can generally get a (good) question (that never should have been closed) reopen within 12 hours (depending on the time of day). And often much faster. Commented May 31 at 14:39
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    @Araucaria-Him: Okay, but it requires an actual campaign. Closing a question does not require this, it happens naturally; and there are a handful of users who love closing questions, who see all new questions. Commented Jun 1 at 7:34
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    @Cerberus-ReinstateMonica Yes, but with 5 reopen votes needed it will be extremely difficult for users to get their wrongly closed questions reopened. I was cynical when we moved from 5 to three votes. But many closed questions get reopened super-fast now. That never happened in the bad old days. Commented Jun 2 at 10:36
  • @Araucaria-Him: But but even more are closed now, are they not? By the way, I would be in favour of counting any regular up-votes by Trusted Users as reopen votes ex post facto. Commented Jun 2 at 23:46
  • @Cerberus-ReinstateMonica I don't think there are; either numerically or proportionally. It's just that now that there are so few questions left open, the problem is more brutally stark. What we need here is some figures from the PTB. Hard data would answer this question and guide us as to what to do. Commented Jun 4 at 23:16
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    What’s the use in allowing posting more answers under those questions? Commented Jun 10 at 8:12
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    You don't think people who come here and see a single-sentence question with +20 votes will assume that they can ask a similar question that contravenes all guidelines? Commented Jun 13 at 13:05

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