Martin Sleziak's room

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4:18 PM

Q: Why has my question on Aristotelian Spaces been closed for being 'insufficiently focused'?

My question on Aristotelian spaces begins with a motivating preamble and ends with a specific and focused request as to a property which I say would help characterise these spaces. I've bolded this part in an edit to emphasise this. However, it has been closed, presumably by a moderator, for bein...

Even if you're not logged in, you should see the names of the close voter in the revision history and in the timeline. The banner at the top of the post clearly says "Viewable by the post author and users with the close/reopen votes privilege". Here is a screenshot showing what I see: i.stack.imgur.com/abJzC.png Unless you're accessing MO in some non-standard way, if the names are not displayed to you, it could be reported as a bug. — Martin Sleziak Feb 1 at 10:49

Since there is a description saying "Viewable by the post author and users with the close/reopen votes privilege", I have automatically assumed that I see the same thing as the OP does - it seems that I was wrong. But it was pointed out to me that the names are not shown in this banner to the OP, here is the relevant post on Meta Stack Exchange: How could we improve our planned post notice improvements? The close voters are still visible in the timeline and in the revision history. — Martin Sleziak Feb 2 at 12:36

A: How could we improve our planned post notice improvements?

status-completed Update: We've changed the post notices for question askers so that they do not see the usernames of close voters listed - this includes askers with the close/reopen vote privilege. We considered making it so that post owners with sufficient rep could still see the list, but deci...

@GerryMyerson: I believe that the names of those who closed a question are not shown to its author in order to prevent retaliation (or more clearly: vindicative behaviour). Not all users have the emotional stability necessary in order not to take closure personally. — Alex M. 5 hours ago

@Alex, as Martin points out, the names are shown (to the author) in the revision history. — Gerry Myerson 4 hours ago

@GerryMyerson: Ah, then I suspect that the various parts of the SE software have been modified, in time, by various teams at various moments, so that now there are incoherences between them such as the one just noticed. (This under the assumption that my interpretation given above is correct.) Should we report this as a bug? — Alex M. 4 hours ago

@Alex, I'm not sure what "incoherence" you mean. — Gerry Myerson 4 hours ago

@GerryMyerson: My conjecture is that the SE staff attempted to make the casters of close votes anonymous to question authors, in order to prevent retaliation. This explains why the information displayed to OPs on that blue-gray closure banner does not include these names. The fact that OPs can still "cheat" and see these names by looking at the timeline defeats the intended behaviour, and looks like an incoherence in the SE software: by default you cannot see votes, but if you know some elementary SE tricks you can get around this. I see a contradiction here. — Alex M. 2 hours ago

@AlexM. Based on the fact that a bug report related to this was marked as (status-bydesign), this seems like an intended behavior: Names of close-voters are not visible in the post notice but in the revision history and timeline. (I'll also mention that I copied some of the above comments into this chatroom - in case we want to continue the discussion there. Although I certainly admit that I have contributed substantially to this digression from the original topic.) — Martin Sleziak 16 secs ago

Q: Names of close-voters are not visible in the post notice but in the revision history and timeline

I am not a user with close/reopen votes privileges on Travel Stack Exchange, therefore I can't see the names of the close voters in this question: However, they are visible when going to the revision history: or the timeline of the post: This also happens when I am not logged in: I canno...

bug status-bydesign vote-to-close timeline post-notices

A: Names of close-voters are not visible in the post notice but in the revision history and timeline

The goal here isn't to make closing a secret process of some sort. It's often important to know what all has happened to a post, and why - so the revision history and timeline seek to provide this. Removing the names (and other details) from the default question view aims to preserve the bare m...