I just marked this question as a duplicate all by myself. I am not a moderator and I don't think this should be possible.

Did I miss something?

So who has a gold badge in "vote-to-close" on Meta, to close all the duplicates of this question? –  AndrewS May 12 at 22:48
Related on MSE: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/231504/… –  Lance Roberts May 12 at 22:56
I've my 1x bronze badge on Meta and darned proud of it too! Is this like the code Olympics? ;-) –  Fred -ii- May 12 at 23:44
how is this an event that ends in 7 days? –  eis May 13 at 8:29
@eis Perhaps that's the only way to keep a notice in the bulletin for several days? –  Duncan May 13 at 8:33
@AndrewS Why not just edit them and re-tag to anything you do have a gold badge in? –  J... May 13 at 8:33
All I can say is that my motivation for acquiring a gold badge for certain tags has increased manifold with the superpowers that come along now. –  devnull May 13 at 8:35
@J... It is based on the tags from the first revision so re-tagging won't work. –  Jack May 13 at 13:36
I wish people had to have at least a bronze badge in one of the tags in the question to be able to vote to close it. –  Akavall May 13 at 13:51
@Akavall: When the initial tags are all obscure or nonsense, that doesn't work so well. –  user2357112 May 13 at 14:38
@Jack That's unfortunate. I had a question earlier that had all the wrong tags on it: they tagged it with all of the technologies involved except the one where the problem was (which is the one I have gold in) :-(. The only other tag that could relevant to the problem doesn't have a single user with a gold. –  cimmanon May 13 at 14:48
@cimmanon I think it's a problem they are aware of but doing it on all revisions or the last revision allows more potential abuse. There was a suggestion that maybe it should include all edits by the OP. –  Jack May 13 at 14:54
Do keep the consequences in mind, it isn't just "stackoverflow sucks" anymore, it is you that sucks. Do expect revenge downvotes, they'll pick your favorite posts of course. Afaik you can't lose the gold badge by those votes. –  Hans Passant May 13 at 23:24
Indeed, revenge downvotes are inevitable. But that is a price I'm willing to pay. Now if only we can get gold badge holders the ability to close questions as off-topic, we could really start making some difference in the signal-to-noise ratio... –  Cody Gray May 14 at 9:11
@jwenting As mentioned above in the comments, you can not retag to get the superpower. –  epascarello May 14 at 15:01

2 Answers 2

up vote 350 down vote accepted

Yes, you are now a Superhero, able to wield the mighty Mjölnir.

question marked as duplicate immediately because Jack has the javascript gold badge

The rules are:

  • You can instantly close as a duplicate any question that was originally asked with a tag you have a gold badge for.
  • You can instantly reopen any question closed as a duplicate that was originally asked with a tag you have a gold badge for.
  • You can only close or reopen a given question once (this hasn't changed).
  • If you get in a fight with someone over whether a question should be closed, moderators will be notified and they'll hit everyone with hammers lock everything down and tell you to go home.

Remember: duplicates are questions that ask for a solution to fundamentally identical problems - many questions have similar or identical answers but are not duplicates. By the same token, many questions are asked using very different wordings but seek to solve identical questions - closing these helps folks find their way to a solution even when they don't know what terms to search for.


Hmmm, I was surprised to see my new superpower and am now thinking I will have to vote to close more carefully if I am now a sole decider. When I've had my own question closed by a single person (a moderator at the time), I was a bit miffed that it didn't require at least a few souls thinking the same way. It will be interesting to see how this goes. On the other side of things, I am glad that more questions which are clearly dups will now get the right action. –  jfriend00 May 12 at 21:57
@jfriend00 the rationale is that you should only have been voting to close as a duplicate if you were sure it was a duplicate to begin with. So, if you're not sure - same methodology applies that you shouldn't be voting. Hopefully it'll stop obvious duplicates lingering and potentially not getting closed - it's a trail run - guess we'll see how it goes :) –  Jon Clements May 12 at 22:00
I wonder if the gold badge is a bit restrictive for low-activity tags. A gold badge requires total score of 1000 in at least 200 answers. In low activity tags, it's easy to get well over 200 answers, and still far less than 1000 score. I don't really have a solution proposal either, though. –  Joshua Taylor May 12 at 22:21
You're correct: this is not particularly helpful for niche tags, @Joshua. We have other plans in the works that should help there, but hopefully this change will reduce some of the backlog and let smaller topics get more visibility. –  Shog9 May 12 at 22:23
@Shog9 Glad to hear it! I think it might help a lot in the niche tags, because the fact that questions are answered by a smaller number of users means that awareness of the duplicates is higher (i.e., the answerer of the original recognizes the duplicate). At the same time, fewer users means that the close votes come much more slowly. –  Joshua Taylor May 12 at 22:27
Just a small note: unless I'm missing something, there doesn't appear to be any change to the UI that would alert someone that the close vote they're about to cast is going to be binding. I know of one person that was caught off guard by that already. I realize that everyone should be using the same amount of caution anyway, but I was sort of expecting a more direct warning than a Meta post. –  joran May 12 at 22:36
Wow! I can’t wait to try th… oh. –  U2744 SNOWFLAKE May 12 at 23:42
"GO FORTH AND USE YOUR NEW POWERS FOR GOOD!" ... and not for "evil". –  Fred -ii- May 12 at 23:46
What's "enough", @quincunx? There are 1.8k gold badge holders, 4k active 10k users, a few hundred thousand active users... What does 2 or three votes tell you about "agreement"? Close voting exists to prevent abuse, not establish consensus. –  Shog9 May 13 at 4:09
+1 This is a great idea. It seems quite right for a privilege to be associated with the very challenging achievement of reaching gold status on a tag. –  Duncan May 13 at 8:34
@IanRingrose Perhaps I'm reading your comment wrong, but I don't think I said anything to suggest that php and my-sql are niche tags. I can certainly see the advantage of this behavior in those tags. I'm just a little sad that I'm the top answerer in sparql and rdf at the moment, so I recognize a lot of dupes pretty quickly, but still have a hard time getting them closed because of low traffic in the tag. Similarly, it looks like only one in the top ten of lisp and common-lisp will be able to use this. –  Joshua Taylor May 13 at 10:50
Aha, its increased overall vote power in a way anyway. If you take 5 people, yesterday they were able to close only 40 questions, but now they can close as much as 200! Good news. –  Your Common Sense May 13 at 16:20
This power is truly unlimited: If you want to close/reopen a post, simply edit it, add a tag you have gold in, open/close it, then edit it to remove the tag. Bwahahahahahahahaha ha ha heh. –  Yakk May 14 at 13:39
Yeah, we did think of that, @Yakk. Only initial tags count... –  Shog9 May 14 at 15:51
Well, this is not a complete idea... I mean, there are tags e.g. the qt with about 30K questions without people having golden badges. Still, it is a significant tag IMHO. What we might see C++ "gurus" coming to the qt badge knowing not so much about it and closing, and the actual qt "gurus" will not have even the same power. That scenario sounds unfair. –  lpapp May 15 at 16:01

It seems that this doesn't work in the simplest manner possible.

This question was originally tagged and . I do not have a gold badge in either one. But I felt that the question was general enough that it should also be tagged . So I added the new tag, and performed an experiment. I opened the question again in a new browser window, and tried to close it as a duplicate. My close vote was counted, but it was only a "normal" close vote.

What is the algorithm for determining whether the question is eligible for super-closing by the current user. It doesn't seem to depend on the set of tags which are current when the close vote is cast.

It's the original set of tags. –  Mysticial May 16 at 2:54
Ok, so edits won't change that "original set"? –  John Saunders May 16 at 2:55
Correct. Sure it's suboptimal, but it's the current way of preventing abuse. –  Mysticial May 16 at 2:56
@Mysticial: I can see the potential for abuse - but really, are we going to mistrust our gold badge holders that much? Especially since new users often don't understand the tagging system yet. How about allowing "gold badgers" to close based only on tags they haven't added themselves? –  Tim Pietzcker May 16 at 5:18
@TimPietzcker I can understand erring on the side of caution. High-rep wonder-users can often disappoint with their behaviour. In the current design, worst case scenario is that they cast the first of hopefully 5 close votes. –  Duncan May 16 at 15:32

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