Why doesn't Community flag questions closed without a comment on graduated sites?

Question

On Chem.SE, whenever I close a question without explaining myself, Community♦ flags it (something like "question closed without comment").

I recently closed this question on Physics (I reopened it later, the close was a mistake--I meant to close something else). Community♦ didn't flag anything, even though the post had zero comments.

I feel that it should be the other way around. It is much more important for Community♦ to flag on graduated sites than on beta sites (though having the feature on both would be good as well). On a beta site, it is generally a moderator closing the question (who should know that a comment must be left). Even if it isn't, the volume of closed questions is low, and it's not too hard for mods to look through /tools (or use a closed:1 search) and review the community-closed posts.

On the other hand, on graduated sites, mods are not always present for each close, and it's harder to review community-closed posts. A post closed without a comment is thus something that is much harder to catch. And yes, it does need to be caught--some closed posts are salvageable, and need a "Do X, and we may reopen it" type comment. Others need the reason behind closing to be explained to the OP so s/he won't make the same mistake again or be scared off from the site.

Could we have the feature on graduated sites, please? (Maybe excluding SOFU sites which have too many flags already)

Answer 1

Let's ignore SOFU then. And MSO.

In the past 30 days,

• 199 questions have been closed without comment on Programmers
• 158 questions have been closed without comment on Ask Ubuntu
•   94 questions have been closed without comment on Mathematics

That's another 3-6 flags a day for these sites - flags where presumably we'd expect a moderator to step in and take the time to write a good, helpful comment explaining the problem. Of course, there'd be a lot more on SOFU.

There's nothing wrong with that. Helpful comments from moderators or anyone else are always welcome. But at that scale, it becomes a real chore - while some folks might not mind it, others would find it irritating... Especially when there are so many other people in the community who could be leaving these comments.

More importantly, it's less necessary on graduated sites. These sites aren't in such desperate need of any and all new members that they must hold the hand of anyone who wanders by in hope that they stick around. Again, it's a good and nice thing to do - but not so critical that the system should be nagging a small handful of users about it.

I could see the use of a 10k tool or /review queue for such questions, but raising a flag for every question closed on a healthy site seems like a huge waste of resources.

Remember also, one of the goals of the revamped closing system was to encourage anyone voting to close as off-topic to leave a comment explaining why, while making the default reasons specific enough to not require it. While we haven't always hit that goal, a graduated site with clear, well-written default OT reasons should need fewer explanatory comments on closed questions.