Worse, when a moderator closes a topic, it stays closed, even when they're wrong. I recently asked a question, but moderators misunderstood my question so they closed it as offtopic. I explained my question in more detail, and it should have been apparently that it is clearly on-topic, but they didn't do anything about it.
I see this happening in a few comments, so I'll address it here (Full disclosure: I'm a (diamond) moderator on Stack Overflow).
Whether your question is closed by a diamond moderator, or by the community, it can be re-opened with five community votes (or another moderator stepping in an re-opening it, which happens).
If your question is deleted by the community, it can be undeleted by the community. The only time a question cannot be undeleted by the community is when it's deleted by a moderator.
There's a difference between moderators, and community moderation. I see people using the word 'moderator' when they mean that five members of the community closed their question, and this isn't really correct (it makes it seem like a band of 12 people runs Stack Overflow, which is the furthest thing from the truth).
In your particular case, if you improve your question to address why it was closed, it will automatically be placed into the review queue to be re-opened. If five members of the community agree, it will be re-opened. If it still doesn't get re-opened, you can always open a meta question about it ( http://meta.stackoverflow.com ).
I wanted to address this because it's incorrect to say, "When a moderator closes a topic, it stays closed." That's just not the case.
If you link me to the question, I'll be happy to take a look at it and re-open it if it should be re-opened.
I think that the single-person deletion allowed to mods is a big mistake. It's hard to correct and can be handed or really randomly. For example look at question 2380148 on SO. Years old, both question and answer have 10+ votes, there were other people both commenting and answering... But some one mod decided to delete, so it's gone. (He lost the diamond since then so now I can vote against it - it was not possible originally)
The post was closed because it is obviously off-topic as stated in the FAQ. We've recently implemented a substantial overhaul of the closing mechanisms, and so you'll see on that question (http://stackoverflow.com/q/2380148) that there is now a close reason that is very specific:
"Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource
are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract
opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem
and what has been done so far to solve it." – George Stocker
The question is still there and is still helpful to anyone who happens to land on it from some search; it just cant' be contributed to anymore unless the question is edited to raise its quality and the community reopens it (it doesn't take a diamond-mod to reopen). I can't tell that it was ever deleted, although it could be that a status change was backfilled after the flags updates.
It was not closed. It was deleted. Will was a diamond mod at the time he did it. After posting this message I voted to undelete which is probably why it was just closed by the time you got to it.
But doesn't that illustrate the problem enough? You don't see the history, mod's actions are unknown now. I agree that it can be closed according to the current rules. I was talking only about the deletion.
It's a very frustrating site. I take the time to carefully write up a question, and many things can happen to that.
* it doesn't get answered
* it gets closed pretty quickly (and usually in an offputting insulting manner)
* it gets changed(!) and a question I didn't ask gets answered
I suspect there's a lot of frustrated wikipedians taking it out on Stack Exchange.
Generally speaking if I'm going to take the time to write a question on SO it's because I can not find the answer already, only to have that question not answered, or worse edited beyond the questions original intent.
Yeah, I've asked questions and found within 5 mins people are rushing in to change the wording and tags and so on. Pity they do not spend more time finding answers.
