Is flagging to close old questions best practice?

Question

Related: How to get attention required to close old posts?

Every once in a while, I stumble upon an old (usually subjective) question that would have been closed before it left the front page if it was asked right now.

I've earned the privilege to vote to close, so I can't flag the question as not constructive or similar. Therefore, I've been flagging them for moderator attention.

As far as I can tell, these are my options:

1. Post a list here on Meta. I got this idea from Super User Meta, where similar actions have been taken (e. g., Please help reopen this shutdown question? or Need help with "need help" questions).

   That would work probably work and it would require the assistance of only four other community members (rather than a moderator), but it seems sub-optimal.

2. Vote to close. Since the questions are quite old (some were asked in 2008), that doesn't seem to have any effect.

   I have read How to get attention required to close old posts?, which is status-completed. It made me think that voting to close a question makes it appear in some list, but it looks like I misunderstood something. I have tried voting to close a few old questions, but none received any close votes besides mine. It's possible that there simply was nobody that agreed with me, but I find that hard to believe.

   These are the questions I recently voted to close:

   • https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7002/what-javascript-patterns-do-you-use-most

   • https://stackoverflow.com/questions/116581/open-source-why-or-why-not

   • Why Silverlight?

   • https://stackoverflow.com/questions/714269/has-anyone-used-tntnet

   • Anyone using Moonlight?

3. Flag for moderator attention. This is what I have been doing so far and all my flags have been declared helpful and all the questions have been closed.

   I'm just worried that this takes up the moderators' valuable time. Closing old questions cleans up Stack Overflow, but I imagine that there are more important issues.

TL;DR

Is flagging to close old questions best practice or is there a better way to deal with them?

Answer 1

For really old questions that are unlikely to get enough attention to receive 4 more close votes, flagging for moderator attention and requesting closure is probably the best approach.

Considering that most of the questions you'll be flagging as "off topic" or "not constructive" meet those criteria in ways that are painfully obvious, the moderator who handles your flag won't have to make much of a decision. Those are the kinds of flags whose processing time is best measured in seconds, rather than minutes.

In cases where it's not quite as obvious, then you might consider posting a question to open up a discussion on Meta. Moderators often don't like to act unilaterally unless it's quite clear what they're doing is justified. Otherwise, it's best to defer to the community consensus, and the best place to hash that out is right here on Meta.

This is what I have been doing so far and all my flags have been declared helpful

That's what the "mark as helpful" feature is for—to provide feedback to flaggers that their flags have been useful and helpful. When your flags get marked "helpful", that means you should continue doing what you're already doing!

I'm just worried that this takes up the moderators' valuable time. Closing old questions cleans up Stack Overflow, but I imagine that there are more important issues.

No, this is an important issue. And this is what moderators are for. Certainly a conscientious user would avoid involving a moderator needlessly (i.e., when they have the necessary privileges to perform the action themselves), but in this case, I think it does make sense to flag the question for moderator attention. If the moderators really don't have enough time to process all the flags, then they will let us know and we would (once again) need to elect some more moderators.

It made me think that voting to close a question makes it appear in some list, but it looks like I misunderstood something.

Your initial suspicion was, in fact, correct. Questions on which a close vote has been recently cast do appear in a list, but that list is part of the 10k tools, which is only visible to users with 10k or more reputation. That said, I don't know how many people go through the questions in that list, so it makes sense that you haven't seen very many of the old questions getting closed.

After looking more carefully, it appears that there are two lists. One appears under Tools -> Close -> Recent Votes (make sure to click the drop-down arrow to see more! took me a while to discover that). The other appears under Review -> Close. So whenever you're bored or have close votes left... :-)