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I'm sure we've all seen numerous cases where questions get closed within seconds (and sometimes only because the closers haven't really understood the question). Others have voiced their concern about this on meta as well:

Whether they are correctly or incorrectly closed, the question is often edited to improve it, or users comment on why it's not a duplicate etc...

But by this time the question is already long ignored, and falling off the front page. Casting reopen votes are from what I've seen mostly futile.

So my question is, would it be beneficial to bump questions whenever they receive a reopen vote, so there's a chance that the well-intentioned poster actually gets a response to his/her question?

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the question is often edited to improve it,

This bumps the question.

Also, when a question does get reopened, it gets bumped, too.

Because of that, I don't agree with your proposal.

(beyond that, use the 10k tools to find questions to reopen -- there is a tab with all pending questions with close and reopen votes.)

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  • Good point about the editing, that didn't occur to me. There are still cases where only comments are left, though I suppose the obvious answer is for someone to just edit the question. Nonetheless, I've rarely seen a reopened question.
    – David Tang
    Commented Feb 3, 2011 at 11:53
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    @box9 with 3k questions per day the reality is that askers need to ask good questions. The askers are just the sand that produces the pearl. You don't optimize for sand. You optimize for pearls.
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Feb 3, 2011 at 11:58
  • You may be right, though it certainly makes SO less welcoming. I'm not talking about completely hopeless questions - those should definitely be closed, even deleted - but then there are those that are just misunderstood. Remember that someone has to think it's a pretty good question to cast a reopen vote, so it's not like we're bringing back crap. But the way it is, 1 close vote is much more powerful than 1 reopen vote.
    – David Tang
    Commented Feb 3, 2011 at 12:08
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    @box9 the question askers are quite literally the least valuable users in our system. See: blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/03/…
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Feb 3, 2011 at 12:12
  • hmm I took some time to give this some thought, but while I completely agree with your blog post, what you're saying here is different and I think we're potentially shutting down / discouraging some good users. Oh well, I'll let it rest unless some others have some input.
    – David Tang
    Commented Feb 3, 2011 at 13:27

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