FAQ and close votes

Question

After having read the FAQ my understanding was that

• Interesting on-topic questions should be voted up
• 'Not interesting' but on-topic questions (too broad for example, or questions that cannot be answered) should be discussed and eventually voted down should no way to make them interesting be found
• Off-topic questions should be closed, regardless their interest

The rationales behind this understanding stand in this part of the introduction:

Questions can be upvoted if you think they'll be interesting, downvoted if you think they won't be, and closed if you think they are a poor fit for the community.

And also, section "Off-topic questions are important, too":

Questions that simply don't fit in the scope of the site should be closed, indicating that, while perhaps interesting, this topic is inappropriate for this site.

I tried to apply this and therefore upvoted, downvoted, and voted to close some questions, a couple of days ago. Today, I have noticed that all my close votes were reverted: instead of close(1) I just see close behind these questions.

Does this mean that someone voted these questions not to be closed (in which case everything is fine) or does this mean that these close votes were reverted by an admin (should I have made a mistake when voting to close these question further to a misundersanding of the FAQ for example)?

Thanks for letting me know, especially if I was mistaken.

Answer 1

If enough people do not vote to close a post, close votes will eventually start to age off automatically. This is designed to prevent posts from being closed over a long period of time when random close votes simply continue to accrue.

Area 51 has a particular problem with this process because there isn't really a large enough audience to get the number of views seen on your typical Stack Exchange site. This means that smaller proposals don't easily accumulate enough close votes to close all the posts that need to be closed.

But I wouldn't worry about it too much. Continue to vote to close the posts you think should be closed. It's a good exercise to let people know what you feel will not work, and more often then not, the appearance of the close votes is enough to get other folks to take a second look.