I have reviewed a few hundred triages over the past years and it's the first time that I got review banned. I see why this happened and I will continue review posts after the ban ends. However, here are a few things I want to point out from the perspective of a not-so-hardcore SO user:
- I usually only enter the review queue when there's the red overflow indicator. The only reason why I'm doing triage is because I want to help out the community that has basically taught everything about coding and allowed me to grow from a complete beginner to the most-respected coder in my school.
- When I saw the red indicator this morning and the dropdown says "no review queues available" I genuinely thought there's a bug in SO and stumbled into the ban message when I tried to figure out what happened with the intention of filing a bug report.
- I never knew there was a Help and Improvement queue and that choosing
Requires Editing
will send the post to a different queue until now. - I read the entire review queue guideline document several times over the past years. When I just started working on the triage queue I always chose
Unsalvageable
for problematic posts. Then when I looked at my flagging history I found that about half of the posts I flagged for closing were disputed asRequires Editing
, and that made me wonder if I've been too critical and started sorting questions toRequires Editing
category (which was what lead to this ban). I admit I should have gone back to the guidelines when I had that question but I didn't. - For posts that actually fit the definition of
Requires Editing
I usually just edit them when I see them instead of flagging (so this means I'll probably never chooseRequires Editing
in the future.
I think one possibly easy-to-implement improvement is to make reviewers who do not have access to Help and Improvement queue aware of the existence of H&I. Maybe add to the review queue dropdown something like "this action will send the post to a different queue so choose it carefully" to the explanation for Requires Editing
. For me the problem isn't that I didn't read but I never knew that. As I mentioned earlier, I only review posts because I wanted to help alleviate the stress of the community and I would have never chosen "sending this post to another queue that's already overflowing" if I knew that's what would happen. To the best of my knowledge this is not documented anywhere (I can't confirm it now because of the ban). I think many reviewers with the same intentions will be benefitted a lot if this is made obvious to them.