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The obvious answer is to flag them as Needs improvement. However this appears to be ineffective because all this does is push the items into the Close Votes queue and there do not seem to be any active Close Votes reviewers (0 reviews today). Every single close flag I have raised is either on a question that would have been closed anyway, or aged away.

As such, I turned to flagging as Very low quality instead because these flags will not age away and will go to the moderators who can unilaterally close questions. But they all get declined as:

Declined - This is what downvoting and comments are for.

How can I more effectively get an off-topic question closed? There are not enough Close Votes reviewers to actually make the close flags have any effect whatsoever. And the Very low quality flags get declined. And all the other flag options are not appropriate for off-topic questions.

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Well, shoot. Sorry about that. That's embarassing. We've had difficulties with lack of people handling the review queues for a while 1 2, but I hadn't realized it had gotten so bad. That sounds like a frustrating situation. My apologies for it.

It appears no one has been reviewing the close votes queue in quite a while. People do seem to have been reviewing the suggested edit queue, though there was still a backlog. Unfortunately, this site has lost quite a few of its most active users over the past few years, which is a challenge.

Since you called attention to it, I just went through the entire close vote queue and suggested edit queue now and handled every one that I could. I realize this is not a sustainable solution for the future.

In the future, I think the best I can suggest is to keep flagging as Needs Improvement with the specific close reason. I realize this is not much of a solution, given your experience so far. I'm hoping someone else will take up some of the load of the review queue, since I won't be able to reliably handle it.

My apologies again for the "can't-win" situation.

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  • $\begingroup$ Here is one that I close flagged and is still pending. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 30, 2023 at 20:50
  • $\begingroup$ @user16217248, Yup, I saw that in the review and took no further action, because I don't feel confident about whether I'd be on solid ground unilaterally closing it. I have to leave that to the community. $\endgroup$ Commented Dec 1, 2023 at 8:17

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