In February we had 6 questions in the close vote queue that we ultimately decided to keep open.
In March we had 4.
In April we had 1.
In May we had 0.
Since 26 march we've had only 1.
In fact for more than 2.5 months, close vote reviewers (who are unpaid volunteers by the way) have not been asked at all to review any questions for closure.
Let's continue this trend of alternatives to close voting, such as: leaving constructive comments and allowing the OP time to make improvements.
The benefits of having a welcoming community in which users do not feel discouraged to ask questions due to seeing close votes on questions before they've had a chance to be told what was actually wrong in the comments, and to actually respond with improvements to the question, are in my opinion great.
- For abandoned questions, feel free to flag for a moderator to hammer close, as we've been doing now for months.
- For very-low-quality questions, continue to flag the question and select the VLQ option!
- For spam and CoC violations, please flag them as such!
- For duplicate questions, leave a comment like I did here (you'll only be able to see it if you have enough rep to see deleted questions though and the user may voluntarily delete the question themselves (as they did in this case), which saves them the "embarrassment" of having to have their question enter the close-vote queue.
If a user is not responding to comments for a couple weeks, then feel free to close vote afterwards!
