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While I understand the logic behind reviewing answered questions in the close queue - that is, bad questions should still be closed or put on hold in order to discourage people from asking them, even if they have been answered already - there are three glaring problems with this idea:

  1. Many of the questions that are appropriate to close, are from new users with a reputation of 1. Completely new users probably won't be discouraged by the fact that we are putting thousands of questions on hold, because they have never asked a question before and so they simply aren't aware of this torrent of closes.
  2. Putting a question on hold has the best deterrent effect if it happens before any answers are provided.
  3. Putting a question on hold is more helpful to the user than nothing at all, if no answers have been provided. If, on the other hand, a useful answer has already been provided, putting the question on hold is not really directly helpful, although it does help to enforce community norms.

It's very frustrating that I have voted to close unanswered questions that are not even about programming and yet are still unclosed after 7 days, probably because their tags have too few followers - while at the same time I'm being asked to review questions for closing that have up to 9 answers, which seem kind of less urgent to close.

Putting unanswered questions on hold would actually help users to ask appropriate questions in appropriate venues and get appropriate answers. Why can't unanswered questions be prioritised in the close queue? Maybe not with a 100% weighting over answered questions, but at least with a heavier weighting than they have at the moment?

If this is not desired, can we at least have a filter to enable those of us who care about this to opt to review unanswered questions first in the close queue?

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    In particular, questions where the previous close vote(s) is/are all on the grounds of "unclear what you're asking", and there are multiple answers, seem especially pointless to review - since clearly there was enough information in the question to at least guess at two or more answers.
    – Robin Green
    Nov 30, 2013 at 11:35
  • "If this is not desired, ..." - I think it actually makes more sense to have everyone on the same prioritization, whatever that is (oh, and I'd like to know what that is, preferably with an open dialogue to improve it). Otherwise we'll just be motivated to request more and more options (but allowing differentiation between the off topic reasons seems pretty fundamental).
    – Bernhard Barker
    Dec 3, 2013 at 0:37
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    For new questions, I think it's absolutely useful to prioritize them before other questions, but once they reach a certain age, they're just sort of sitting there in the background somewhere - it's kind of like 'who cares?'. Sure, we preferably want them gone, but there are more important questions to tend to. And I hope you're talking about having upvoted and/or accepted answers, not simply any answers, as 1 (or more) bad answer is pretty much the same as no answer.
    – Bernhard Barker
    Dec 3, 2013 at 0:41
  • Yes, I meant answered in that sense, as that's the meaning that's used if you click on Unanswered Questions currently.
    – Robin Green
    Dec 3, 2013 at 7:35

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