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The people in the PHP chat room often run out of close-votes (and so rely on posting requests so others can close the questions), so I thought I would create a Chrome extension to help automate the process for people who want to help with spare votes.

  1. When users run out of votes, the Vote To Close button redirects the close-vote to a server, which stores the vote in a database.
  2. In other users' browsers, the extension will download a list of close-votes from the server, and vote to close the questions received if the user has votes left.

Is usage of this acceptable?

Points have been raised about accountability (although this could be partially fixed by making a publicly available list of who voted to close what, a bit like what Blockchain.info does for Bitcoins).

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    What you're describing is definitely not acceptable. You would be directly subverting the close vote limit. It's one thing to suggest close votes to others, but automatically submitting the votes to the server from another's account? No way in hell. You'd be granting users of your extension unlimited close votes, which is clearly not what SEI intends.
    – Jeremy
    Commented May 1, 2013 at 1:22
  • @JeremyBanks although, this action is roughly equivalent to adding a post to the close vote queue manually (which can't currently be done).
    – Richard J. Ross III
    Commented May 1, 2013 at 1:41
  • @JeremyBanks What if I limited the number of votes?
    – uınbɐɥs
    Commented May 7, 2013 at 1:38
  • @uınbɐɥs Tolerating your extension would still be similar to raising the close vote limit by whatever number of votes you choose. I suggest you try to get the close vote limit officially raised instead (either in general or for users fitting fulfilling some criteria). Systematically circumventing it would probably be grounds for a suspension.
    – Jeremy
    Commented May 7, 2013 at 1:46

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If it's automatically casting votes on behalf of another user (which your second point kind of makes it sound like), then yes, I'd have a problem with that. I'd consider that an abuse of the system. If the user on the receiving end of the list actually has to look at the post and decide for themselves, then I don't see how it's any different from cv-pls requests or even the Close Votes review queue - perfectly acceptable.

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