Why is there no voting for closing or holding questions?

Question

I've been on StackExchange sites for over a couple years, some sites work, others don't. What concerns me about this site is the amount of "on hold" questions that are closed by only one person. On stackexchange it takes 5 votes to close a question, which is fine. But after spending a couple months on this site, it is starting to seem to me like it's someone's personal kingdom and not a community Q&A site... If community feels like a question is off topic, let community decide so.

Consider my last question on animation timings that was closed by a single person 4 minutes after it being posted.

Answer 1

It takes five votes to close a question on any StackExchange site. It also takes a single vote from a moderator to close a question (which is what happened in the case of your question).

When a question is voted for closure, it first goes into an "on hold" state. The purpose of this state is to provide guidance as to the closure reason and allow the post to be edited to address the issues raised in the closure reason. Questions so edited go into the reopen queue so that the community may vote on reopening them.

We do this because some types of questions are not considered a good fit for the StackExchange Q&A format. That doesn't mean they are "bad" in general or "stupid" questions, and closing them isn't intended to be a punishment. But StackExchange in general and GDSE in particular isn't a forum, and so certain kinds of questions just don't fit.

Among those types of questions are those that are overly broad or for which the answers are primarily based on opinion and not objective data, such as yours.

We close questions aggressively because it's better for the site in the long run. When off-topic questions are left open, not only do they provide a bad precedent, but they also tend to attract off-topic answers that become invalid when the question is subsequently edited, thus degrading the quality of the post and answers for future visitors.

There's a large amount of moderator-close votes here because there isn't as much voting by the community itself. We've been trying things to encourage more active participation by users with sufficient reputation to cast votes, with mixed results. I would really prefer not to have the moderators stepping in so often, but I would prefer allowing the site to fill up with off-topic questions even less, so this is where we are right now.

Answer 2

For what it's worth, I'd have voted to close that question too, for the same reason, if the mods hadn't gotten to it first.

The question is completely opinion-based, asking for people's opinions about how long particular game actions should take. It's the equivalent of asking us "how long should my piece of string be?"

There are no objective answers to that sort of question -- what works best will be different for every game based upon what your intentions are, so we can't provide universal, objectively-correct values.

Best advice is to iterate rapidly until you find satisfactory values which work for your game.

Answer 3

It only takes one vote from a moderator to put questions on hold. It's not closed yet, it's on hold giving you an opportunity to adjust the question to be on topic.

When questions are clearly off topic, moderators often decide to put the question on hold before it progresses too far into getting answers. Otherwise, a question will be answered, then those answers need to be adjusted when the question is modified, or the question is later closed, leaving the answerers feeling like they wasted their time. Things just become messy.

This happens a bit more often on this site because there are not enough people with close privileges for closing to happen in a timely manner (if at all).

If you have questions which you think should be open, you can edit them to be placed into the reopen queue. Also making your case for why you think it's on topic in the comments or here on meta is a good option.

Answer 4

Unfortunately a lot of questions here are off topic because of the huge number of beginners' questions. A lot of the topics about game design are also opinion based (maybe we need to address this). Unlike stackoverflow where questions are usually about implementation details which usually have a correct answer. We also get alot of which tech to use questions, which makes the number of off topic questions higher.

It's not a personal kingdom, If moderators always wait for the community to close, then a lot of the questions will still be opened because of the low number of 3k+ users, and the relatively low traffic on the site (unlike SO).

On the other hand your question is opinion based I would have closed that too, but moderators got it first.