@Mari-LouA Is this room always empty? It doesn't seem there's a lot of people talking here! I wanted to ask you for some advice, since you're active on one of the sites where they reduced the number of required close voters from 5 to 3. Do you think this would be a good idea on a site where there's only 5 active close voters in total?

@NikeDattani I very rarely visit any chat room, so I wouldn't know if this room is always empty. As for lowering the number of close votes to three, that choice should be left to the community. EL&U can close Qs with 3 votes, I argued against it but the mods were more keen to adopt the new proposal.

ANY site which has only five active users visiting the review queues is not what I would call "thriving". The main problem is enticing more users to participate in the housekeeping, I find that the smaller the group of reviewers the more likely they'll vote in unison.

If you're talking about ELL, you should make that clear. If instead it's a different site, one which I do not frequent I am the wrong person to ask, talk about it on their meta.

@Mari-LouA yes the site is not "thriving". Part of this is because a large volume of questions get closed. When people come and put serious effort into writing a question, and it gets closed immediately, then they're unlikely to come back. With so few people coming back, and many people leaving because of their questions getting closed, there's only 5 people left, which are the people doing the closing (the only ones who don't have a problem, because they're the like-minded people doing it).

@Mari-LouA Oh no, it's not ELL!

I've been talking about it on the site Meta, but wanted to get some advice from people on sites where the 5-to-3 change has already been made.

@NikeDattani Then bring up the issue on that site's meta.EDITED. You have already. There's not much more you can do than visit the review queue and vote to keep as Qs open as possible.

Obviously VTO posts which have a hidden gem, or are typically on-topic.

@Mari-LouA It's an extremely inactive site, but one of the most visited in the whole network, I think you would be surprised if I said which one it is! The Meta post about reducing the requirement to 3 close-voters, has a net score of +1 for "yay" and -1 for "nay". There's literally only 5 people voting, and it's 3 up / 2 down, or 3 down / 2 up.

@NikeDattani why the secrecy? in any case, it seems likely that the number of votes will have to be lowered otherwise no Q will ever be closed. Are the mods are doing all the dirty work?

@Mari-LouA There's one active mod and he's hammering questions closed 100% of the time, but there's very few questions/day so it's not a lot of work.

@NikeDattani "he's hammering questions closed 100%" that's probably why so few users are reviewing, a mod is doing the donkey's work. It's been good chatting, see you around :)

@Mari-LouA See you around!

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Manually reported answer (94): Is "nargile" known in English spoken countries to be related to "hookah"?‭ by Alex‭ on ell.SE