Bring back review numbers to the top bar

Question

Though I never quite understood what those numbers were and they were quite ugly, they were the only reason I ever visited the reviews page.

Can we have similar functionality back on the top bar please?

Answer 1

After giving users some time to get used to the top bar and some time to accumulate data about review behavior (hattip to Gilles), we've realized that removing the suggested edits indicator was doing more harm than good. It's been added back to the top bar for all users who have access to the suggested edit queue (2k rep).

This is, however, a temporary measure. We can and should be doing more to get people into all review queues, not just the suggested edits queue. That becomes a much larger project, however, and I'd like to take a few weeks to work out an intelligent solution to that broader problem. Since suggested edits are already kind of languishing, though, I don't want to make that problem worse while we're scheming about grander things.

TL;DR: The suggested edit count will go back in for now, but it may change as part of a broader review notification system sometime after the new year.

Update: We now replace the suggested edit count in the top bar with the number of pending reviews for 10k users and diamond moderators. On Stack Overflow, we are currently excluding the Close Vote queue from that, but hopefully we can put it back in once we can control its size a bit better.

Answer 2

Another reason to bring back the suggested edit indicator is that on smaller sites (i.e. not on SO), the suggested edit indicator is often 0. So a lot of people with the requisite privilege don't keep checking the review queue, they wait for the indicator to appear. Without the indicator, suggested edit reviews will be significantly delayed.

This is not good. Suggested edit review is not like other review tasks which can wait until somebody's interested in doing moderation. A pending suggested edit on a post locks the post against modifications by users without the edit privilege. Without the indicator, posts will spend longer in that semi-locked state.

At least the suggested edit indicator should be immediately visible, at least on sites other than SO.

Here's some data on suggested edit review speed. Methodology: I computed the average time between the submission and the approval or rejection of suggested edits over a 1-week period, or over 100 consecutive suggested edits on the few sites that received more than 100 per week. I measured three 1-week period: the week since the top bar went live (it's been a week today, except on MSO and AU; I excluded AU and took the date of the top bar introduction as a reference on MSO), the week before, and the week before. I chose weeks to avoid effects related to the time of day or day of week, and show two weeks before to get a small idea of the variance. For each period, the table below gives the average delay in minutes (rounded down) and the number of suggested edits that this averages over. The last column expresses the new-top-bar value as a percentage of the old-top-bar value (e.g. 100% means no change, 200% means that reviews take twice as long). I only looked at sites with at least 7.75 questions per day, because slower sites tend not to have a statistically significant sample of suggested edits. (7.75 is where the API throttled me out…) I then filtered out sites where there weren't at least 10 suggested edits during the weeks concerned.

                  avg(mn) cnt  avg(mn) cnt  avg(mn) cnt
  site              before^2       before       after
        webmasters      13   35       9   15       5   10    45%
     stackoverflow       6  100       5  100       4   97    74%
                ux      60   12      51   19      42   32    75%
           android      64   16      57   23      52   21    85%
           physics      48   52      40   54      45   54   100%
           webapps     245   26     166   23     229   17   111%
            drupal      72   28      41   30      65   28   115%
            gaming      22   97      28   82      32   88   128%
         wordpress      29   49      20   24      32   37   131%
       mathematica      15   31      35   20      35   34   139%
           magento      68   15      71   16     122   16   175%
         superuser      59  100      65  100     111   99   179%
          security      37   39      58   26      93   51   193%
       electronics      25   52      18   38      46   45   213%
              math       8  100      12  100      22   98   214%
      mathoverflow      18   38      22   28      43   29   214%
             apple      55  100      53   48     123   72   227%
       programmers      30   36      28   30      67   40   229%
               dba     142   16     167   20     382   14   247%
meta.stackoverflow      10   46      12   54      28   59   255%
               tex       4   61       5   52      11   76   256%
               gis      31   47      34   41      84   28   259%
        codereview      36   17      19   17      91   12   328%
             scifi      47   36      57   23     177   29   338%
             stats      13   57      25   31      68   43   358%
              unix      26  100      16  100      78   99   373%
            crypto      29   27      48   15     150    8   389%
           english      24   50      17   43      89   55   424%
        sharepoint      38   23      32   20     158   22   450%
       serverfault      68   80      50   97     292   72   497%
               diy      72   10      26   12     280   13   569%
           bitcoin     129   58     265   46    1319   30   670%
            movies      22   22      37   15     241   11   813%

Conclusion: on most sites, there was an increase in the time it took for suggested edits to be reviewed. On more than half the sites, the time more than doubled.

The disappearance of the suggested edit indicator is the only change that I can think of to explain this significant increase.

We need it back.

Answer 3

I'd prefer for the indicator to be shown in the bar - I don't want to have to go dig for it.

Some mockups, in order of what I think looks best first:

Answer 4

To make it consistent with the other top bar parts, I would just make the "review" change color when there are new suggested edits waiting for review:

And tooltip showing how many of those are available.

In ideal world, I would like to see the "review" open into a list of queues, but that's still far away.

Answer 5

With reference to my question, I'm sharing my thoughts. Currently there is only Review option where there is notification like before. So here is my feature-request, of adding dropdown for Review option. Which includes the options like
1. 10k Tools
2. Suggested Edits

Here is screenshot of my proposal.

Answer 6

I wrote a user script that can put the review count in if you are running Firefox with Greasemonkey extension or Chrome with Tampermonkey:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/184677