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I regularly raise flags on questions for closure since I do not yet have the reputation to vote to close them. Recently, a number of these flags were "aged away". By checking the timelines of these posts, I noticed that the close vote review was usually "invalidated".

(Update: some of the questions are deleted, so I have struck out the links.)

I asked a question on Meta about the meaning of a close vote being "invalidated", and it seems that this means that the close review generated by the flag aged away due to insufficient votes.

This is problematic, because as seen above the flags I raised were being invalidated not due to falling short of one or two votes. Instead, there were usually zero votes or one vote on a question. This means that there is very little moderation activity from the community. On some occasions, I have had to flag the same question again for moderator attention because the earlier flag aged away or was invalidated, and then action was taken.

So, this being the scenario, I request our moderators to help out by regularly visiting the review queues to clear them. If closure flags age away in a week, then it would be preferable if at least one of our moderators checks in every few days or so and reviews any pending flags. I searched on Meta and also found this question about whether we need more moderator activity/moderators.

In the long term, perhaps we need to find ways to make more users aware of the need for participation in reviewing and moderation. We currently have 81 users with at least 500 reputation (the minimum required to view the close/reopen review queues), so finding eligible users may not be the main problem.

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This site is supposed to be community driven and without the community helping out, things like this will happen. The mods are all fine with clearing the reviews as I try to do once a month, but this doesn't always align with what the community wants especially when normal users aren't reviewing.

Personally, I tend to be faster on hard actions like close and deletes, but that also has it's drawbacks and issues raised on the meta in the past. So recently I've been pulling the trigger less on these. I can't speak for the other mods, but I feel they may have similar contemplation keeping them from clearing out the queues and flags.

A takeaway from the stats you brought up is we need a community here to help.

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