death valley is good for a good solar city

Using CS makes sense because binding close votes is currently a mod-only privilege, and CS is meant to show they are a somewhat reasonable mod candidate.

Not sure if 25 is too high. But I wouldn't want this ability granted on the basis of badges only (which contribute 20 to CS). Requiring CS>=25 means rep has to be at least 5K. Another way to achieve this is to have two conditions: require 5K+ rep and 15+ CS, or something along these lines.

However, last night I woke up in cold sweat after a dream with a high-CS user reopening a question just to answer it. What a terrible thing that would be.

But then I realized this thing isn't worth losing any sleep over (on an otherwise functional site), and the dream went away.

Possibly. I never remember my dreams, so I could have dreamed about that.

If unilateral closure/reopening sounds like too big a gun, make it conditional on there being another close/reopen vote/flag on that question. This is getting toward the too-complicated "weighted voting" system, but isn't really that complicated: a question gets closed/reopened if a high-CS user thinks it should be, and they are not the only person who thinks that.

In particular, this avoids the scenario from the aforementioned hypothetical dream.

Still takes awfully long while to get 3 votes. How about: 1 vote at first, 2 at second cycle, and so on until reaching 5.

So, a potential close/reopen war would go CRCCRRCCCRRRCCCCRRRR(CCCCCRRRRR)+

Kind of like with bounties, where one needs to invest more to repeat the action.

Because I don't want Braiam to have binding close vote on SO.

25 may be too high, there are 5547 SO users with this score. (Skeet has 37, btw)

There are other sites besides SO? (All this is meant for SO only)

Let's say we require 10K rep and 10 CS-counting badges. (So the CS is at least 20, with 10+ from each category). There are 3953 such users.

Random sample of users at the lower end of this list: stackoverflow.com/users/4601170/ei-captain-v2-0 stackoverflow.com/users/1828289/alex-i stackoverflow.com/users/256544/splash

Hm, I'm in top 7% of SO users this month, maybe I should have a binding vote. :p

Another slightly crazy idea is to have a quasi-election process on meta by which a few hundred users are granted quasi-mod privileges (and become known as quasimodos). No PII access, just binding close/vote/review decisions.

OK, that's more than slightly crazy.

@zaq By the way, in my nightmare scenario, the reopener has read and understood the question, and contemplated it for long enough to find an answer. This is more than can be said about many close/reopen decisions.

I conjecture that the most frequently misspelled adjective on SO is separate. (Although "separate" as the verb is also counted here, hmm.) What's the most common misspelling of a noun?

Chickens give us feathers, eggs, and meat. Be grateful to chickens, and never kill them in cruel ways.