Allow voting "Vote to not close" from the question without being in a review

Question

I just reached the 3k rep limit required for close votes and have started exploring the vote-to-close UI that's opened up to me, and I have a request.

The review queue has a Do Not Close button, but when I click the close link under a question that has close votes (i.e. it shows close (1)), there isn't an option for me to vote against closing the question. I came across a question that had a vote to close it as not a question, but it had just been updated with code and more details and was no longer a candidate for closing. However, I couldn't cast a vote to not close it from the question itself. When I clicked on close, it brought up the usual voting UI, and "Do Not Close" was not an option.

TL;DR, do this:

1. Open a question in the close votes review queue
2. Note the Do Not Close button
3. Click the question title to go to it
4. Click the close (n) link under the question (assuming it hasn't already been closed)
5. Notice the lack of an equivalent "Do Not Close" option

Could a "Do Not Close" option be added to the close button popup for questions that already have close votes, that way the review interface isn't the only place a "Do Not Close" vote can be cast?

Edit: Okay, so 5 3 "Do Not Close" votes kicks it out of the review queue, it doesn't have "no effect" as suggested in the comments. (See this question, in which the answer from Shog9 was just updated a few minutes ago to say 3 DNC votes.) I still don't see why the same DNC option can't be available from the question.

Basically, I guess I would like some rationale behind this bullet point from Shog9's response to this question:

Only accessible from the review queue (so rather difficult to target a specific question). Yes, this is very much by-design.

Answer 1

The goal of /review is to expose these posts to a broader audience, and collect enough evaluations to approximate an objective answer to the question, "should this be closed?" Without the "Leave Open" response, questions would be very likely to hang around until they were closed regardless of merit.

If you have an interest in a specific question, and feel strongly that it shouldn't be closed, there are better options than a weak 'do not close': fix whatever problems exist by editing, rebut any invalid charges against it, perhaps even write a good answer that implicitly refutes "unanswerable" concerns, and then - if it still ends up closed - vote to re-open. Providing a "leave open" option in this context works against this by simultaneously being the easiest, least-helpful, and least-effective response.

And as I noted in my answer here, I've no interest in a more powerful "don't close" vote that creates gridlock and implicitly discourages efforts to correct problems with a question.

A better idea here would be to take the productive actions outlined above and silently interpret them in the same fashion as a "Leave Open" response in /review. This would then put folks viewing the question in /review and those viewing it organically on a more equal footing, while still encouraging productive and corrective actions rather than pointless battles.

Answer 2

No, and this is by design. As you can imagine, there are so many users on Stack Overflow that, if one could vote against a close vote, nothing would ever get closed that should be closed, and nothing would ever get reopened that should be reopened.

Keep in mind that the purpose of closing a question is to give the community time to fix the problems with it. In many cases, when a question is reopened, it's done so after members of the community have edited the question to remove any possible issues with the question. Even if the question was borderline and was voted to close, in general, such questions still get edited and improved to help avoid another group of 5 users coming by and voting to close. If you can't convince people the question is good as-is, then just simply fix those problems so that those folks have nothing to complain about anymore. ;)

This is a good thing, and the system works. Questions that are closed will either stay closed, or get improved, convincing more people to vote to reopen.

With items in the review queue, what happens is this: When 5 "Do Not Close" votes accrue, the post is simply removed from the review queue, and the close votes start to age. The question still maintains the number of close votes, and the post is still visible to moderators and 10K users in the moderation tools.