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A pattern I observe over and over again is that at PMSE it's basically impossible to get question closed unless one of moderators kicks in. There's just too few people who care enough, or understand enough, to vote for close, even if we deal with exact duplicates or very similar questions.

Recently I brought a couple of such examples here:

It basically means that, unless additional actions are undertaken, questions remain opened, people answer them and so on. As my goal would be to close or merge such question a means to this goal is throwing such examples to meta where they get moderator's attention. So far it seems to work. The question is: whether it will be considered spamming. Maybe we should use another tool which I'm not aware of?

By the way meta is almost dead anyways so it shouldn't be much of the problem, but maybe it's just me.

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    What I see people do on other sites is vote to close and leave a comment to help the issue become more visible to other users with close votes. I second Robert's preference for more community involvement. We need to get other users with close votes more involved :)
    – jmort253
    Jan 3, 2012 at 23:14
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    I'm happy to help out. My ranking is low on here, but I frequently moderate questions on StackOverflow.
    – CodeWorks
    Apr 15, 2012 at 12:10
  • @CodeWorks - You can definitely help out. Anyone with 15 rep or greater can flag questions that are off topic, not constructive, not a real question. Additionally, you can also make suggested edits to posts, which earn you 2 rep points per approved edit. See the community moderation guide for more information. On a beta site, editing is extremely important!
    – jmort253
    Jun 28, 2012 at 1:30

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Pawel, flag the questions. As a moderator I try to be fast and responsive to address flagged questions.

If a question lingers for a while without action, it often means I have looked at it but am unsure as to what to do. I leave it open for other moderators and the user community to add in any feedback or take action, if they have a more clear feeling on what to do with it.

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  • Um... actually the standard SE action for exact dup is closing, not flagging. If we decide that flagging is a way to go, than great I will do it. However people might be confused that when they choose proper issue from the list it gets voted to close and not flagged.
    – Pawel Brodzinski
    Dec 30, 2011 at 14:36
  • Your question is about closing "it's basically impossible to get question closed" and how to get a question closed.
    – Mark Phillips
    Dec 30, 2011 at 18:45
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    There is a concern that, if the moderators take on the entire role of community self-moderation, the community isn't doing their job and the viability of the site will suffer. Having the diamond moderators take on this responsibility will not scale. I would urge moderators (and avid participants) to make frequent use of comments to help guide users where action is appropriate... and how to properly use the site.
    – Robert Cartaino
    Dec 30, 2011 at 18:51

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