This was originally an old announcement, but still relevant today for different reasons.
On this public beta site, every user with 500+ reputation has the ability to help with closing and reopening questions, which is important as it helps to keep off-topic or unanswerable questions off the site while making sure on-topic ones can be answered. There are currently 117 such users, but only a small handful of them have participating in closing any questions in the last 365 days. This situation is especially worrying since two of the most active close-voters have recently been elected moderators, which makes us more hesitant to cast close votes since they are now binding.
May I remind all 500+ rep users to please continue using these powers when necessary. Please remember to check the Close and Reopen review queues regularly, and be conscientious about voting to close new questions if they shouldn't be here and voting to reopen closed questions which have been substantially improved or shouldn't have been closed in the first place.
Below is the original text of this post from 2017.
Literature SE has just entered public beta - yay! - which means a lot of the reputation thresholds for site privileges have changed. Specifically, the one whose threshold has changed the most is the ability to vote to close and reopen other people's posts.
Up until this point, everyone has been able to cast close/reopen votes. Every single user, even those totally new to SE with just 1 reputation point. Now that privilege has suddenly been restricted only to users with 500+ reputation - currently 29 of us. Of course this number (of users able to VTC/VTRO) will grow rapidly, but it will take a long long time to become quite as large as it was yesterday.
