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I'd like to be able to revoke my own flags and close/reopen votes.

Since it can take quite a while for question votes to accumulate, the questions often change in the meantime. The same applies to delays in moderator actions for flagged posts.

  1. Badly worded purchasing questions get transformed to more generic recommendation questions about how to do product research (and actually get useful answers).
  2. Questions that are too narrow to be useful to others are changed to apply a lot more generally.
  3. Random heaps of characters are reworded by a helpful editor and actually make sense now.
  4. I re-read the post (at least I'm not the only one) and discover that I was just too damn stupid to actually understand it the first time. While a helpful comment might make me aware of that, I have no way to undo my vote/flag.

It always annoys me to see this happening some time after casting a vote, or even flagging, without being able to revoke these. I can, after an edit that improves the question, revoke my downvote, but not the close vote.

While it requires five votes for questions to be closed, I've seen it happen often enough: the last one or two votes trickle in, even though the questions have been significantly improved, be it users that didn't reload in half an hour, have a different tolerance threshold or like being the last nail in the coffin, and the improved questions get closed anyway.

There's the option to reopen questions, but really, once they're off the top of the front page and/or closed, how many users come back and check to see what happened to the question? Without rallying users in chat or flagging for moderator attention, there's little that can be done.

I don't want to be able to reopen closed questions by withdrawing my close vote; but changing/revoking my vote if the post hasn't been closed (or my flag not acted upon) yet — why not?

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  • 3
    Simply leave a comment for others to see and I'll happily ignore it :-)
    – Ivo Flipse Mod
    Commented Jun 23, 2011 at 11:32
  • @Ivo Tried that before for accidental close votes, even explaining to others why it's not off topic etc.; didn't particularly help. While I might have been wrong, nobody bothered to correct me or even respond.
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Commented Jun 23, 2011 at 11:40
  • 3
    I wish this was possible. Especially in the case where the OP quickly responds to a call for improvement it might not be encouraging to already have some close votes accumulated. While a mod may happily reopen afterwards, you still need a user to flag them (if the question is older). And -- from the OP's standpoint -- getting your question closed even if you improved it might scare you away from taking further action.
    – slhck
    Commented Jun 23, 2011 at 11:52
  • 4
    Just to warn you: Jeff has declined this request on MSO though I feel his opinion is skewed to communities the size of SO. Like you say, it doesn't work that well on SU with a small community able/willing to vote
    – Ivo Flipse Mod
    Commented Jun 23, 2011 at 12:41
  • This is now [status-partially-completed]: we now have the ability to retract close votes, but once you've retracted your vote, you cannot VTC the same post again.
    – gparyani
    Commented Jul 22, 2014 at 22:06
  • @Sathya - This is tagged status-completed, but I've never seen anything that addresses how to recall a mod flag. Is there a way to do that?
    – fixer1234
    Commented Feb 8, 2015 at 17:31
  • @fixer1234 mod flag revocation is not yet possible, the status-completed is mainly for close votes since the bulk of the question deals with close votes
    – Sathyajith Bhat Mod
    Commented Feb 8, 2015 at 17:55

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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While not exactly answering your feature request, I do feel the need to point out one thing:

There's the option to reopen questions, but really, once they're off the top of the front page and/or closed, how many users come back and check to see what happened to the question? Without rallying users in chat or flagging for moderator attention, there's little that can be done.

There's a third option which gets neglected – 10k+ users have access to the /tools route which lists all close votes being applied, all reopen votes being applied, all posts being voted to be deleted.

Now I don't exactly have the analytics, but I'm guessing that these 2 pages go vastly under-utilized – at least going by the trends at which close/reopen votes trickle in. I do urge 10k+ users to have a look at this route.

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