47

Could have sworn there used to be a heads-up when you got down to one vote, but it sure doesn't work that way now. Very frustrating, to sit there considering a question, finally decide to vote, only to find out that I've been out of votes for a while.

Ideally, this would work the same way as up/down and comment votes do: when I get below a threshold (5 sounds good to me), let me know how many votes remain each time I cast one...

George Stocker suggested a change that would also work to solve this: show the number of remaining votes on the close dialog itself. I like this idea, as it avoids creating more pop-ups while still providing the necessary information.

Screenshot of completed UI

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6
  • 5
    There's a limit? Where is this written and what is it? I have only done it a handful of times on Superuser.com but never knew about this limit.
    – William Hilsum
    Commented Sep 24, 2009 at 22:43
  • AFAIK, it's 12 - but i can't find a reference to back that up for some reason.
    – Shog9
    Commented Sep 24, 2009 at 22:54
  • 2
    As generally speaking, the longer you spend on the site, the more reputation you have, Maybe a better solution would be something like, one close per 250 reputation :S ... As the site already must remember / keep a record of how many close votes you submit, I guess this would only have to be a quick query at the time of closing and could be easy(ish) to implement.
    – William Hilsum
    Commented Sep 24, 2009 at 22:59
  • 1
    How many close votes does one have? I seem to have 23 left on SU, and I've already used a few this morning.
    – alex
    Commented Feb 13, 2010 at 17:23
  • 3
    @alex: Perhaps it's been doubled on SU because there are so few high-rep users. It's 12 on SO just like it is on Meta.
    – mmyers
    Commented Feb 13, 2010 at 17:48
  • The dialog now tells you if you've already voted too!
    – ChrisF Mod
    Commented Feb 14, 2010 at 16:20

6 Answers 6

Reset to default
7

They finished this:

Screenshot of close dialog indicating no close votes remain

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3
  • 3
    @shog9: nice edit
    – John Saunders
    Commented Feb 13, 2010 at 20:50
  • It also tells you if you've already voted now too.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Commented Feb 14, 2010 at 16:19
  • I really appreciate these changes. Very helpful.
    – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
    Commented Feb 19, 2010 at 21:00
42

I know what you're thinking. "Did he close twelve questions or only eleven?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is Jon Skeet, the highest rep user in the world, and would blow your question clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question:

Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

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2
  • The question needed a little more wood from the east.
    – perbert
    Commented Feb 5, 2010 at 19:29
  • @voyager - I'm glad you went ahead and made my day.
    – Pollyanna
    Commented Feb 5, 2010 at 19:52
7

This is a good idea - perhaps there could be a small UI treatment that would give you a heads-up display as to how many votes you have for each "vote-able" action. It could pop up on hover of any voting button kind of like how the up arrow and flag appear on comments.

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4

Just ran out for the first time today.

I didn't know it was coming until after I'd spent several minutes reading answers in some alleged duplicates in an effort to determine if the new question really was the same as a previous one. When, at last, I decided it was I voted to close and then got told I was done for the day.

Very frustrating.

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2

I think I've run out of close votes exactly once.

Is this really a serious problem? If so, perhaps you should be rethinking what you're closing and whether it's in line with Jeff's guidelines on what's allowed. For example, career questions are OK but yet some still close them automatically. Also there are questions like First-time software contractor, building a system for a multi-site client; who should own the intellectual property?. Jeff commented:

this is programming related and explicitly allowed – Jeff Atwood♦ yesterday

Now I doubt Jeff would comment as such unless he expected a certain segment of the SO population to jump on their close buttons because there's no code snippet.

So are you simply closing questions you shouldn't?

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  • 8
    These days, most of my votes go to help close duplicate or OT questions. I usually check the list of close-voted questions towards evening, and spend any votes i have left on those i agree with. I don't think i've ever gotten through the whole list... there are a lot of duplicates, and always a fair number of SF or SU questions as well. The big problem is, i tend to forget when the day "rolls over", so some evenings i'll end up blowing the next day's allotment of votes without realizing it.
    – Shog9
    Commented Aug 27, 2009 at 4:49
  • 1
    Maybe I don't spend enough time on SO each day but I pretty much never find things I want to vote to close...
    – TM.
    Commented Sep 25, 2009 at 1:35
-5

Hmmm. I don't think this is valuable. The problematic assumption here is that some questions deserve to be closed more than others.

If you feel something should be closed then it should outright be closed and not given a reprieve because you have one vote left and something else might be closier(TM) later. The system rightfully should be first come first served, and if you're not 100% on it then I would suggest you shouldn't be voting to close it anyway. This is all part of the market forces dynamic of open/close questions I think.

I would further suggest that if you do happen to see something you feel requires urgent closing if you run out of votes then you could always flag it for mod attention.

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1
  • 5
    When I run out of votes, there are always, always, questions that I would like to see closed. When I run out of up/down votes, there are still posts I would like to vote up or down. And when I run out of comment votes, there are still comments I would like to highlight. The limitations imposed by the system force me to think twice about all the votes I cast, and try to vote those I feel are most deserving. The warnings merely come in handy when I miscalculate or when I encounter an unusually large number of good/bad posts. Finally, see: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/357
    – Shog9
    Commented Aug 27, 2009 at 14:52

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