How do close votes age away?

Question

The help center states,

Close votes age away harmlessly if the threshold is not reached after a number of days. If the question has at least 100 views, close votes will age away after 4 days; otherwise, close votes will age away after 14 days. Each new close vote resets the timer, so all close votes must be at least 4 or 14 days old respectively before aging occurs.

So, say that a question has 99 views, two close votes and is then dormant for 8 days. It's then edited and gets view #100. Assuming there were no further votes cast, what then happens to those close votes exactly?

Do they:

• All expire immediately as they're way more than 4 days old but now there are 100+ views?
• All expire simultaneously 4 days after the 100^th view was reached?
• Start to age away at one per day immediately after there are 100 views?
• Start to age away at one per day on the 12th day (so, 4 days since 100+ views)?
• Do something else entirely?

Answer 1

Start to age away at one per day immediately after there are 100 views*

This. There's no "view history" that'd tell us when a post crosses 100 views, so when the aging task fires it just looks at every post that has at least 100 views where all outstanding close votes are older than 4 days, and every post where all outstanding close votes are older than 14 days regardless of the view count.

Then it deletes the oldest close vote. A day later, it runs again and does the same thing, until either another close vote shows up, or all the close votes are deleted.

This works the same for reopen votes and "recommend close" flags.

The addition of the Close and Reopen /review queues adds another wrinkle to this though: if you get enough "Leave Open" or "Leave Closed" votes to complete the review, that also starts the aging process immediately - so four days after the last close or reopen vote was cast, they'll start getting deleted at the rate of one per day until they're all gone or a new one is added.