For those who support the crusade by upvoting the answers: watch out for serial upvoting scripts. On two separate occasions, several upvotes on my answers were reversed by it (sadly, returning some of the questions to the unanswered queue). It's better to work through answers grouped by a tag rather than by an author.
@azimut The software thinks that when a question can be answered with a link to another question, it's a duplicate. But we can't close it as a duplicate because the other post is on a different site. My suggestion: repeat the main points of the solution that Russ Woodroofe gave on MO (copy and paste the relevant part), and consider including the improvements from the comments to that answer. With attribution, of course.
For visitors to this room: if you have a few minutes and votes to spare, enter your tag of expertise into this query and consider voting on the answers. Thanks!
But that tab is not sortable/filterable, hence not very useful. The search works better for finding questions with no answers. E.g., [pde] answers:0 finds them in the pde tag. Live example
@rschwieb But that's the way the system works. The total score is taken into account. And I don't think it's bad. Sometimes a totally wrong answer attracts an upvote from someone who shares the misconception of the answerer. In such a case, it's reasonable that a downvote reclassifies the question as Unanswered.
@rschwieb Downvote on an answer may return the question to Unanswered, if the answer goes from +1 to 0. This, too, may be appropriate when it turns out that the purported answer misses the point of the question.
@rschwieb Downvote on a question may actually help to process the queue, since negatively scored questions are not included under Unanswered tab. This may be an appropriate course of action when the question is unanswerably vague and the OP failed to respond to requests for clarification.
I usually find something to add to my CW answers: another step of computation, sketch of another approach, link to some relevant material. I figure non-crusaders will be more likely to upvote my answer then. (Seems to work: I got 28 Revival badges so far, the most on Math.SE)
I posted an answer to #77307 and then found #64677. Tried to flag the latter as a duplicate of the former, but was foiled by the lack of upvote to the answer.
(The lines above are posted so that other users will see the response when they hover over the original message. An unfortunate side-effect is creating a ping.)
@Lord_Farin Do you think the room name should be made more descriptive? We had multiple visitors who inferred from the title that the room is where answers are given. Something like Review of unanswered questions...
@AlexanderGruber I agree: normal closing should be done by community, not the moderators. Which is why flags to close are not called flags for moderator's attention. They automatically put the flagged question into the Close Review, where the community of 3K+ decides what to do with them.
One problem with moderators handling flags to close is a bias for inaction: moderators prefer not to use their binding votes (and rightly so). Leaving the flag in place allows the decision to be made by five reviewers, who are not constrained by having a binding vote.
@AlexanderGruber I really wish that moderators would stop dismissing flags-to-close as helpful while leaving the question open. Flags to close are in a category separate from flags for a moderator attention. Questions flagged in this way automatically go into the Close Vote queue for 3K+ users, who decide what to do with them. That is, unless a mod clears the flag, preventing the peer review from happening.
