First of all thank you to everyone who has been participating in the reviews to help moderate this growing community!
On the Stack Exchange network, there is the concept of banning someone from reviewing. We don't yet have any guidelines on when we'd like to implement such a review ban, and since previous attempts to get the community's opinion on policy have not resulted in any community input, I'll suggest what I think should be done, and invite the whole community to weigh with their opinions. If no one writes any opposition, we will assume the community is okay with the proposal.
First I'll say that out of the 10 last questions to be reviewed without a hammer-close, all resulted in the "leave open" decision, except for one question (the second highlighted question below was decided by a hammer):
Therefore there's been perhaps someone or some people being a bit too fervent about initiating close-votes, which some reviewers might find to be a bit bothersome, and it may slightly hinder the experience of some of our new users who are contributing questions here only to become disappointed when they see that our community decides to be a bit unwelcoming to the question. But banning people from making the "initial" close-vote is another story, and the only thing I'm trying to address in this post is the question of banning close "reviews", meaning that someone else has already made the initial close-vote.
Now the above screenshot shows a mix of "close" and "leave open" votes. As for a policy for banning close-reviewers, let's start with an extremely lenient policy:
- The only circumstance (for now) in which we would ban a user from close-reviews is if they only vote to close 100% of the time (and at least 10 times) for 6 months (meaning that despite the community as a whole feeling that many questions should be closed and even more questions should be left open, the user is doing nothing but close voting). The same goes for people voting 100% to "leave closed" on re-open votes.
- Edit: after a couple of weeks, I'd like to add one more suspension reason. If a user knowingly violates a site-wide policy related to close-voting/reviewing, for example this policy, then it is a lot of work for us to un-do that action: specifically we have to campaign to get a diamond moderator or 5 community moderators to re-open the question, and that can be seen as an extremely irritating waste of time when there's so much other work for us to do right now. But let's still stay on the side of leniency here: if but only if a user knowingly violates a site policy, and does not make an effort to inform us of their reason for disagreeing with the policy (for example on the Meta post associated with the policy), should we suspend them from close-voting.
Also as further evidence of people being perhaps a bit trigger-happy with close voting, you can see that we have had 457 close-vote reviews as of 14 January 2022:
At the same time, Operations Research has only 368 (despite being about 1 year older than us and more than 400 questions more than us):