Could the first person to close-vote leave an explanatory comment?

Question

This is more of an appeal than a question really. Namely, when a new user asks an off-topic question it is often close-voted without explanation or comments. To me, it makes sense that the first person to cast a close-vote leaves a comment to explain to the new user why this is done and (perhaps) where they can find some guidelines on asking questions on SE. When the question gets closed it does get stamped with a standard explanation, but leaving an additional comment would have two additional benefits:

• If carefully worded it sounds more friendly and makes the site look less unwelcoming to new users;
• Some questions can be salvaged and an early comment can achieve that more efficiently that five people voting to close and than five people voting to reopen a question.

(Yes, I know that most off-topic questions are rarely edited by the OP who is new. Still, we are a growing community and leaving an early comment would make a good policy, IMO).

Answer 1

I try to leave an explanation if I'm the first vote, but I'm not 100% on that. When I don't it's usually either because I think it's obvious, or it's just a crap question I don't think can be salvaged. And yeah, being in a hurry matters too.

But if I had a couple of stock responses I could provide with those shortcuts you mentioned in comments then I would always leave one. Can those be created by mods?

Answer 2

I'm pretty guilty of close-voting without explaining why by your description. I see a lot of the good "standard responses" pop up from power-users and occasionally moderators.

I would add a comment if these standard responses could be recorded somewhere for ease of copy-paste. Maybe meta is the place for this?