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Voting on a closed question
Currently, when a question is closed, it is still possible to add an upvote or downvote.
One possible reason for closing a question is to allow editing to improve, before re-opening. Would it be beneficial to prevent downvotes during this process, until the question is ready to open again?
More generally, should each of the following be possible on a question that is closed:
- Upvoting?
- Downvoting?
- Retracting an upvote?
- Retracting a downvote?
2 answers
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Yes, these options should continue to be active.
A bad question is a bad question, and it is legitimate to downvote it because of that. The fact that it might be fixed later has no bearing on it being bad now. Perhaps there should be a way to notify downvoters when a question is re-opened so that they can decide whether to retract the downvote, but that's not what you asked about.
Another reason to accumulate downvotes on bad questions is to keep the total vote tally for the user accurate. Really bad questions don't tend to be from well-meaning users who happened to make a mistake. Most are from spammers and the like. Having their vote tally be negative will be important if/when we ever implement rate limiting or temporary banning based on accumulated vote score ("rep", if you like).
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Whatever we do, I think the following points should be true in any case:
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Whenever you can give votes, you should be able to retract those votes. Be it because you didn't actually mean to vote (and that's not a theoretical issue; this has actually happened to me, though not yet on Codidact), or be it because the post was changed and you think the new state of the post no longer deserves that vote. The latter reason also means that you should not lose the ability to retract votes as long as the post can be edited. Since closing doesn't prevent edits, it also should not prevent retractions.
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Either you can both upvote and downvote, or neither. I think allowing only one direction gives an undue bias.
So while this post does not conclusively answer the question, it reduces the complexity of the four detailed questions to the simple question: Should voting on closed questions be allowed or not?
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