@jimirings Voting in general is inconsistent :) My inclination is to vote to close shopping questions and let someone else (moderators) worry about whether it meets community expectations. Count me part of the community that wants those questions to go away.

@freiheit some of those are useful, I think what I really want is a library of "identify this bike" somewhere on the net, so that image search can eventually decide that there is an authoritative source for bicycle IDs. In that regard I am inclined to throw together some guidelines for the photos and text and get vicious on people who don't follow them.

Guidelines being something like "at least one side-on shot with a plain background. Photos of any identifying details. Photos to be evenly lit and with good contrast. Text to clearly explain the location of identifying details and include any text from the bicycle".

Part of what causes "identify my bike" questions is that it's very hard to find that information for older bikes and the sites out there that might have the information are generally not well organised.

I too would like to see shopping questions go away. I'm guessing @freiheit has access to the number of "leave open" votes that get cast on these questions, which would seem to indicate that at least some part of the community wants them open. But it's clear that a significant part of the community would like to be rid of them. This might present an example where it's time for moderators to step in and make a decision.

bicycles.stackexchange.com/help/badges/80?page=1

@freiheit I don't love identify my bike posts, I just can't think of a valid reason that they're off topic. As I mentioned in the comments, the biggest problem I have with them is that they're not searchable in a way that's useful for future visitors.

@jimirings That's cool, I hadn't even thought to look there for voting numbers.

I'm also guessing that it's less about vote-to-keep-open votes, and more about taking a week to accumulate 5 votes to close.

@Ӎσᶎ You may be right. But if that's really the issue and a mod was looking at a question that had received two close votes, I would think it would be ok for the mod to go ahead and cast the third close vote. Provided of course that the mod agreed with those close votes.

@jimirings yeah, hopefully @freiheit will supply a little more info.

In the sense that moderators are "human exception handlers," mods should feel free to act on the indication of community consent on a site that's too small/slow to live up to the close standards of Stack Overflow.

In my opinion, anyway.

@Ӎσᶎ I'm sure he will. He's on here so much that I don't think he eats, sleeps, or works.

@jimirings I suspect there's a feeling that without solid consensus closing questions is a bit harsh. Since they can't point to anywhere that says "don't do that" it possibly feels too much like "I made up a new rule, and you broke it, bwahahahaha"

@jimirings don't tell me you're one of those lazy good-for-nothing types who wants a life outside of SE?

"If elected, I pledge to never let my dedicated SE monitoring device out of my sight. I will wake up, if necessary, to immediately leap to complete any necessary task" :)

@Ӎσᶎ I'm not saying that mods should just jump in and close any question that they don't like. Shopping questions have been discussed on Meta several times and the general consensus there is that at best they're a pain, and at worst should be made explicitly off topic. Either way, people don't love them. So if a mod sees one that he/she thinks should be closed and it already has two votes on it, that's far from a made-up new rule. That feels to me like enforcing community consensus.

@Ӎσᶎ I'll have mine implanted directly into my brain. I'll literally dream Bicycles SE.

@jimirings yeah, I'm more trying to explain how I think some of the mods feel, based on other comments.

@jimirings especially if the implant goes wrong...

@Ӎσᶎ Wake up in a sweat... "Must moderate... Can't... access... internet... Oh, the horror!"

"Question: kill all the zombie unicorns!"... hours later "sorry, I was having a nightmare".

Ok, I'm back from being gone last night.

@jimirings It's sort of a pain to see that, so I don't usually bother looking...

@jimirings Yeah, I wouldn't say that identify-this-bike questions are off-topic. They're just not very useful, and so many of them are terrible. They really need a bunch of good pictures and written descriptions to have any chance of getting useful answers and of being useful to future visitors. Even if you do find out the model, who cares? It's more useful to know how to maintain the various components than to know what label got slapped on it when it was being sold.

@jimirings So, when I'm judging whether or not to close a question, I absolutely use some judgment. If it's absolutely clearly a question that needs closing, I'll close it and not count close votes. If it's borderline, I will weigh the number of close votes and flags on it.