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As gleaned from a comment to a different meta question, I learned that close votes "expire" after a certain time period. It appears, though, that those who have voted to close a question are then prevented from voting again. Attempting to cast a close vote after the initial vote has expired results in a "you have already voted to close this question" message.

Is this expected/normal behavior? If so, it really makes appropriate community moderation difficult. See for example this question: Is file_exists() compatible with timthumb.php?

Obviously, it should be closed (TimThumb & is_file_exists() - completely agnostic to WordPress), but it never did get closed. But I cast a close vote a year ago, and now can't again.

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    I think this is one of those cases when logic scaled to larger network sites doesn't work too well for the rest.
    – Rarst Mod
    Commented Feb 6, 2013 at 14:35
  • So, what do we do about it - or, more specifically: how do we work around this network limitation?
    – Chip Bennett
    Commented Feb 6, 2013 at 15:03
  • +1 and: You should add feature-request
    – kaiser
    Commented Feb 6, 2013 at 15:17

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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From What Happened Here? Voted to Close 4 Days Ago, but No Close Votes Today?:

We now use a form of sliding expiration, so as long as close/reopen votes keep arriving at the rate of at least one every 4 days, they will not expire.

Once the votes do expire, vote aging happens every 24 hours, so you can expect the remaining very old close/reopen votes to expire at the rate of 1 per day after that, unless of course someone casts another close/reopen vote in which case the expiration timer resets to 4 days.

Also, if the question has <= 100 views, no expiration on close (or reopen) votes is done at all.

There are two solutions. Well, maybe …

  1. Encourage our members to visit the review queue for closed questions more often. But how?
  2. Ask the SE team to implement this rule on our site:

Close votes (and probably reopen votes) only expire after all of these conditions are met:

  1. 4 days have passed since the last close vote.
  2. The question has more than 100 views.

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