What are the acceptable number of close votes to initiate per day?

Question

I've started a VTC project based on abandoned questions about EOL Ubuntu versions. Tonight I VTC'd only one so far: Boot failure after shutdown during upgrade from 11.10 to 12.04.

However over the last few nights I've probably VTC'd 20 or 30. I'm wondering what the etiquette is for how many per night to VTC using the same old same old "not reproducible" reason?

Because the VTC candidates are derived from SQL I could go nuts and VTC my max 50 flags per day. I haven't written a query to count how candidates there are but it could be many thousand.

So what would be an appropriate number to VTC each day without annoying you? 5, 10, 20?

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Here is the query:

SELECT p.Title, p.Id, p.Score, p.ViewCount, p.CreationDate, p.ClosedDate, p.AnswerCount, u.DisplayName
FROM Posts p
JOIN Users u ON p.OwnerUserId = u.Id
WHERE p.PostTypeId = 1
AND p.AnswerCount = 0
and p.ClosedDate is null
order by p.CreationDate ASC

In total there are 43,981 unanswered questions.

Answer 1

Vote to close as many questions as you legitimately think need closing - no more, no less.

If you're going organically, it's fine to use no close votes a day. Similarly, it's fine to use all fifty in a single day, as long as they're all warranted.

The reasoning for this is discussed here by Jeff Atwood himself (well, for specifically the suggested edit queue):

We really want vote diversity here, so that's the point of the limits -- if the same 2 folks are vetting all the edits, that's not a sufficient set of eyeballs on those edits.

The same principle applies. This limit is in place to ensure that others have a chance to look at the questions in question and make sure they actually deserve things.

You could also consider the limit to be there to prevent abuse by a rogue user, though this seems to be less and less common now.

TL;DR: Nobody cares how many you make, as long as you're still legitimately helping the site in the end.

Answer 2

Update July 31, 2017

In meta Stack Exchange I've been directed to a link where we can request auto-deletion of abandoned questions on EOL Ubuntu versions that have no answers:

• meta.stackexchange.com - Auto Delete Questions

Automatically deleting the questions will save close voting on thousands of questions, clogging up the review queue and taking years to do what could be done overnight.

I have already made a feature-request here in Ask Ubuntu on this question:

• Can we merge these three Q&As about "abandoned questions" on main?

but it was embedded within a larger request to merge duplicates together. Since then I've discovered more "abandoned questions" threads I'll need to research.

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At the time of posting the question I had only Voted To Close (VTC) one abandoned question from EOL Ubuntu 12.04 with no answers or questions. A few days later I had VTC'd about 100 unanswered Ubuntu 12.04 questions and the Close Review Queue grew to 200 or so.

As such I think the appropriate numbers depends on the review queue size. When Close Votes Queue is sitting ~100 limit number of initiated close votes on EOL unanswered questions / abandoned questions to about 10.

More importantly when you initiate 10 close votes make sure you go in and vote 20 times on existing close votes in the review queue. Of course we should all do this each day anyways but this doubles the reason.

I've self sentenced myself to purgatory and am now VTC'ing in review queue only and not initiating anymore close votes until I've met the goal.