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One of my recent question was closed immediately (within 1 min) without any votes to close. I wonder if this is normal if the question is not blatantly off-topic, spam, etc.

We should assume that questions were mostly asked out of goodwill.

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  • 3
    Do you mean that your question was closed without any up or down votes, or do you mean that you question was closed without any votes to close?
    – Robert Columbia
    May 4 at 12:51
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    @RobertColumbia Without vote to close
    – High GPA
    May 4 at 12:55
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    Do you mean this one? It was closed by a moderator. If not which one? Add a link in your question.
    – Robert Longson
    May 4 at 13:47
  • @RobertLongson There are more than one instance of this.
    – High GPA
    May 14 at 20:19

2 Answers 2

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It wasn't closed without votes, but it may be that the close vote was binding, because it was closed by a ♦ moderator, or closed as a duplicate by a gold tag badge holder.

Meta Stack Exchange gets a lot of blatantly off-topic questions, and the moderators here use one of my scripts that closes and even deletes them, without casting a downvote. So the absence of downvotes (if that's what you're wondering) also doesn't say anything.

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As Glorfindel answered the first question succinctly, I'd like to answer the second implied question: "Is this normal?"

Yes, this is normal

Some questions are just blatantly off-topic, duplicates of a "canonical question" or otherwise impossible to answer.

In such a situation, a moderator can simply decide to close a question instead of waiting for the community to get together enough votes to close the question through vote.

An Example

One kind of question that pops up time and time again on InfoSec is some form of "Can you crack this hash for me?" to which the answer is always "No, we are not a hash cracking service."

When encountering such a question, a moderator will close the question immediately and explain why.

Should it be this way?

I would wager, yes. When asking a question, you want feedback as quickly as possible. If your question is missing a critical piece of information, then you want that feedback as quickly as possible, so you can edit your questin and get it into good shape.

And if a question is completely unsalvagable, i.e. blatantly off-topic, spam, etc... then closing it quickly makes sense too.

What if a user disagrees with a mod decision?

I personally never encountered a situation in which a moderator closed a question shortly after it was submitted, while I thought it was a perfectly fine question.

But it's very much possible that such a situation could occur. In this case, I would vote to re-open the question, as well as leave a comment behind as to why specifically I believe the question is fine as-is.

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  • Thanks for you answer. I have a couple of questions that were clearly not off-topic or spam: I even spent a lot of time explaining the question. But they were immediately closed without any community close vote.
    – High GPA
    May 14 at 20:21
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    @HighGPA In this case, it's likely the questions fall outside the scope of the site for one reason or another. I would ask on the meta-site of that specific site as to why these questions are not suitable, and how they can be improved.
    – MechMK1
    May 14 at 20:36

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