How do you reopen a closed question?

Question

To reopen a closed question, five (5) people with at least 3000 reputation must agree that the question is suitable for the site and cast votes to reopen the question.

But:

• How does one actually vote to reopen? Is there a reputation level that you must have before you can see this function? Or do I just leave a comment along the lines of, "I vote to reopen"?
• What happens if someone with less than 3000 reputation leaves a comment that they wish to vote to reopen?
• How can one draw attention to their closed questions? Is it done via a posting new question? Or do you edit the closed question?

Related: What is a "closed", “on hold”, or "duplicate" question?

For more information, see "What if I disagree with the closure of a question? How can I reopen it?" in the Help Center.

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Answer 1

Voting to reopen

You must have the "view close votes" privilege in order to vote to reopen your own question. Users with the "cast close and reopen votes" privilege can vote to reopen any closed question, not only their own. On established sites, these privileges are awarded at 250 and 3000 reputation points, respectively (beta sites have different thresholds).

If you have the appropriate privilege, you will see a link that you can click in the post menu near the bottom of the question (on the same line as "Share⠀Edit⠀Follow⠀Flag"):

Clicking on this will ask you to confirm that you want to vote to reopen this question. If you cast the first reopen vote, your question will be added to the Reopen Votes review queue so that others can see it quickly and possibly cast more votes. After a certain number of reopen votes, the post will be reopened. The number of reopen votes required is the same as the number of close votes required to close on the site (five on most sites, three on Stack Overflow).

In some cases, a single vote is enough to reopen the question:

• A single vote from a moderator can reopen any question closed for any reason immediately.
• Questions closed as duplicates can be immediately reopened by a user with a gold tag badge for any of the question's tags.
• On Hardware Recommendations, a single vote from any user with the required reputation will reopen the question.

Caution: The way the system currently works results in some unexpected behavior when voting to reopen a question. If you were the first user to edit the body of the question within 70 days of it being closed (see "Editing to reopen" below), then if you vote to reopen the question, then your vote to reopen may disqualify the question from entering the reopen queue, or even remove it from the queue if it has already entered the queue as a result of your edit.

Comments to reopen

Leaving comments about voting to reopen does nothing in and of itself. You can try and address a specific user who may have left a comment as to why they voted to close and ask them to help cast reopen votes if you think they voted in error.

You can also leave a comment asking for other users to vote to reopen if you've edited your question to a better form.

Editing to reopen

If the comments are helpful as to why the question has been closed, you can edit the post so that it's a good, on-topic question, or to explain why it's not a duplicate. The close reason, while not always accurate, should point you in the right direction of what to fix.

Editing the body of a question after it gets closed will also add it to the Reopen Review queue, where people with the the ability to cast reopen votes will assess it. A question can only be added to that queue once per closure via editing, and won't be added if it's been more than 70 days since it was closed or if you flagged or voted to close/reopen the post prior to editing it.

If the question is edited, reviewers will be shown a diff view of the edit by default. For this reason, you should make sure that any edits after closure should make clear why the question should be reopened. If you or someone else makes a minor edit and doesn't follow up with a more major edit, reviewers may only see the minor edit and thus disagree with reopening, which may force you to resort to the next option.

Requesting on meta to reopen

If you've tried the above options but it wasn't reopened, or you can't vote to reopen and it's been more than 70 days since the question was closed (so you can't edit it to have it reviewed), you can make a request on the per-site meta tagging it support reopen-request.

You should only do this if:

• You tried the above three options and users still disagreed with reopening it, which you can verify by clicking the clock symbol on the left side under the voting and bookmark buttons to access the post's timeline, then looking for any completed reopen reviews.

• You can't exercise any of the above options (e.g. because you don't have enough reputation to vote to reopen and you can't have it reviewed via an edit because it's been more than 70 days since it was closed or you previously flagged the post before editing it).

Clearly explain why the question should be reopened (why it's a good, on-topic question, or why it isn't a duplicate). This is also a good way to obtain further clarification about why your question was closed.

Answer 2

Regarding the second point: "What happens if someone with less than 3000 reputation leaves a comment that they wish to vote to reopen?"

Obviously leaving a comment has no effect, but to this point, would it be worth having a mechanism for reputation-deprived users to call attention to particular questions/answers so that other users with more reputation can take a look and decide whether to reopen or not?

This could also apply to other features that also require reputation, not just reopening a question. What I'm thinking of would not be intrusive (i.e. it would not send out messages or anything).

For example, I'm thinking that there could just be a list of questions that other users have requested be reopened, sorted descending by the number of users (or better yet, the sum of the reputation of those users) requesting that it be reopened. If any users who have enough reputation to reopen want to peruse that list, then they can do so. If not, then they don't have to.

Basically, I'm suggesting a mechanism that allows users with low reputation to still have some kind of input towards causing something to change, even though it requires the intervention of another user who has enough reputation to enact that change. The benefit is that you're not leaving it up to chance that enough users with high enough reputation have happened to stop by on a particular question, noticed the situation, and decided to take action.

Answer 3

First, you need to understand that closing is a temporary state. It's purpose is to prevent answers being added to a question that is not answerable. If you feel that your underlying problem is one that SO should be able to solve, then you need to change the question in some way to make it answerable. This generally means that you edit your own question. (Occasionally, someone else may edit your question for you if they can guess what you meant.)

Editing your question automatically adds it to a Reopen Queue where others can vote to re-open it if it is now an answerable question. You may see a reopen link on your question - clicking this will vote to re-open it, though you need more than just that one vote. Caution though: if you think your question is completely clear and appropriate, but 5 people misinterpreted that and closed it, the chances are slim enough people will join you in voting to reopen it. Editing is usually the right tactic. Comments on the question may help you decide how to edit it.

Some closed questions are later deleted, which is much harder to recover from. As soon as you get comments suggesting some people can't figure out how to answer your question, look to see how you can edit it to be clearer: include some code, show the error message, explain what output you expected and what you got, include less code, or whatever it seems the question needs.