Almost impossible to get questions out of "on hold" state

Question

I've seen this happen a couple of times: It's going very fast to put a message on hold, but taking very long (if at all) to revive it.

As with this message, which needed some more seconds of thinking in the original version. Somebody did understand and answer it, but others didn't and voted to put on hold. This is okay, you can expect people to post a better question if they want good answers.

But the problem is, although I reworded the question to be understood more easily, it didn't get enough votes to be reopened. And that's what I observed before. Users struggled hard to improve the quality of their question, but it didn't get rewarded. This is frustrating, as you can see from a couple of questions in meta.

I don't have the 3000 reputation to be part of close voting, but obviously flagged posts draw a lot more attention to get close votes than on hold questions get to be reopened.

What could be done about that?

P.S.: This is not about the given example! That man has his answer and I don't care. Let's not argue about a specific case, but about the general problem.

Answer 1

Let's not argue about a specific case, but about the general problem.

In general, over the last 30 days, 588 questions were closed. 24 of them were reopened, which sounds low, but only 93 of them were ever edited after being closed; most are just bad questions that get abandoned.

Users with 3000 reputation that can vote to close/reopen also have access to review queues that highlight questions that are good candidates to be closed/reopened. Closed questions that have any reopen votes, or are edited by anyone within 5 days of the question's closure, or just have lots of views, are automatically put into the reopen queue to be reviewed. 372 votes were cast in the reopen queue in the last 30 days, but 2/3s of them were to leave the question closed.

In the specific case you listed, the question was reviewed, and it was an exact tie between "leave closed" and "reopen", so it stayed closed. Of all the reopen reviews in the last day, every one was unanimous except that one, so you seem to have found an edge case. If you have a particular suggestion to help reopen good questions, we can look into that, but it seems like in most cases the questions are closed for a good reason.