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What recourse is there for incorrect close/delete?
Sometimes a moderator closes or deletes a question, but non-moderating users may see this as incorrect.
Closures and deletions are unilateral moderator actions. There is no way for regular users to respond to them.
If users think the moderator made a mistake, what are they supposed to do?
- Are moderators considered infallible and if users disagree, the user is always wrong?
- Do you flag as "other reason: reopen", even though the UX is worded like a request to close the question (which is already closed)?
- How do you complain about deletions? Do you just repost the question?
- If you suspect the flag was ignored, because the moderator refuses feedback, what then?
- Do you complain in the closed question's comments, and hope the original mod will see it? AFAIK you can't "@-summon" people to new comment threads in Codidact.
- Do you make a new post in meta, linking to the original question, to ask for a justification?
- If an individual mod keeps repeatedly closing incorrectly, how is this detected and addressed?
Occasionally I see closures where the questions is valid, valuable, can be improved with a few simple edits, can be answered in a useful way (even without edits). Then a mod closes it with little explanation, and the discussion is abruptly halted. Tbh, often these seem like the mod mixing up "I'm confused" with "question is bad" - maybe that assumption is wrong, but there's no way to ask the mod what they were thinking.
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Sometimes a moderator closes or deletes a question, but non-moderating users may see this as incorrect.
Then discuss the particular case in meta for that site.
Occasionally I see closures where the questions is valid, valuable ... can be answered in a useful way
That's your opinion. There is a wide spectrum of views across these sites on how much crap we should tolerate before closing. Discussing the particular case in meta will help establish the sense of the community. Often that's not a clear mandate one way or the other, so moderators get considerable latitude in judging whether a question needs fixing before others should be allowed to answer it.
can be improved with a few simple edits
Then it was correctly closed.
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The best place to raise concerns about any specific actions -- whether by mods or by the community -- is the per-community Meta category. Differences of opinion about closing questions might really be differences of opinion about scope or policy, or they might be rooted in differing knowledge. A constructive community discussion about these issues is a good first step in resolving them. Moderators are not infallible and are not necessarily experts in all aspects of a community's scope. They are trusted caretakers, ideally chosen by the community (but I know we don't have formal elections here yet).
One problem this post and its comments have pointed out is that until now there was no way to ask for a closed question to be reopened except through a custom moderator-only flag. Users with the Curate ability can close and reopen (and take some other actions), and they can see the standard flags, but they can't see the custom moderator flags so you've got no way to systematically communicate with them about reopening. We've now fixed this by adding a new flag type, "change post status", to request close/reopen, lock/unlock, or delete/undelete. When raising this flag you must add a message about what you want. As part of this change, we renamed "other" to "moderator attention" and clarified that the latter, unlike other flags, goes only to moderators.
I recognize that abilities are still too hard to get (we've had Meta discussions about that and don't yet have a clear path forward), but flagging for curators is a start. Remember that moderators can explicitly grant abilities, so while we work on that, communities can appoint curators if they'd like to.
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