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My experience with stackexchange has been...rough to say the least. People with more privilege then me tend to close my questions unfairly, and generally act unprofessionally. While this is far more rare here on rc.se it does still happen (a question of mine was closed, then reopened years later).

The only recourse for people who have experienced this is to whine about it on meta, so that hopefully a moderator notices and corrects it.

I think it would be far better if there was a dedicated appeal system for questions that get closed or deleted; I op could simply send a request to users with even higher privilege with a detailed explanation of why the question should not have been closed or deleted.

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The only recourse for people who have experienced this is to wine about it on meta, so that hopefully a moderator notices and corrects it.

Retrocomputing Meta is the dedicated appeal system. You can post your detailed explanation of why you think it should remain open here, with the tag. Once the question receives a single re-open flag, it'll be inserted into our Reopen queue, which users with the reopen privilege can access; so if you've asked a meta question about the closure, it's worth linking to it in a comment.

As documented in our help page, What if I disagree with the closure of a question? How can I reopen it?:

  1. You can leave a comment on the question itself calling for it to be reopened. Be detailed: explain why the question shouldn't have been closed; don't just assert that it should be reopened. Be constructive: name-calling is against the Code of Conduct, and is more likely to drive folks away than to win them to your cause. Remember, anyone on the site with at least 500 reputation points can vote to reopen a question – even if a moderator closed it.

If you're simply unsure about the validity of the closure, the best place to ask is on the community's meta site. Asking in the meta site allows those who took the action to comment, and will help others to learn about the issues being discussed.

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I am not sure such a system would actually help. Especially that it kind of already exists.

An asker can edit their closed question and submit it to the reopen review queue; this can be done even by users without close-voting privileges (I just checked on ELU):

This edit resolves the original close reason and the question should be considered for reopening.

If you think the question is fine as it is, you can make a trivial edit and check the box. (Though if you ask me, the fact that it was closed in the first place suggests you could probably at least edit it for clarity, to make it more evident that the question is appropriate.) You can write the explanation in a comment under the question; unless the comment section happens to be drowning in intense discussion, you can probably expect it to be seen by anyone who stumbles upon the question and is able to vote for reopening. Putting it in the edit summary field is more likely to be overlooked.

Unfortunately, sites on the Stack Exchange network suffer from a dearth of reviewers, and they are ultimately drawn from the same pool of users as the close voters. It’s a thankless job that quickly causes burnout and it doesn’t even earn you any Internet points. Retrocomputing so far has not been affected much by this, but that’s mostly because of our comparatively low question rate and in consequence, review queues staying empty most of the time; as such, the reviewers are much less likely to become overwhelmed.

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