Lock questions in the review queue while being reviewed

Question

More and more frequently in the review queues, I am spending time either fixing a post or considering whether an edit is valid, etc, only to make changes and have them denied/not count because someone else has blindly hit the approve button in the meantime.

My proposal is for the system to "lock" a post in the review queue once it has been presented to someone for review. Do not let anyone else (in the review queue) do anything with it until it is released by the last user it was presented to (or a certain amount of time has elapsed).

By "lock" I mean that it won't show up in anyone elses list until released. I did NOT mean that it would be in multiple queues and be unactionable in some of them. This would fit well as the queues only present one at a time anyway.

This will allow people trying to make good decisions the time to do it and prevent someone else from making that effort a waste of time.

As support, look to some of the published reasoning behind the auto-question ban. A large portion of it is that bad questions waste the time of the community. Taking the time to ensure you are making a good decision in the /review queue only to have it not count because someone was badge-whoring and clicking the approve button as fast as they could also wastes the users time... arguably the more (for lack of a better way to put it) valuable user who is willing to invest some time and thought into making the site better.

Answer 1

I agree completely, there's absolutely no reason good editors and reviewers trying to improve the Stack Exchange community should be overridden by stupid robo-reviewers looking to get a shiny free internet points badge. It's also really frustrating to pore over something editing it and then to have it say 'nope, people already reviewed this'

However, this may cause a few logistical problems, as well as slow down the reviewing process significantly. When as many reviewers are online as there are reviewing, and one person starts reviewing marginally before the other, chances are that someone will get that review while another person has it. I'm not sure how easily that could be fixed, but I'm sure that it could be fixed.

Also, it would slow down the reviewing process for smaller review queues. If only one person is allowed to review, and everyone else has to wait for a certain amount of time or until everyone else is done reviewing, there will be a lot less available reviews in the queue. While this wouldn't be a problem for most queues, I'm afraid that this would cause the CV queue on SO to spiral even further out of control..

Actually, upon further consideration, no this wouldn't. It wouldn't really affect the size, and could possibly speed things up for the CV queue, as more posts would be getting close votes at the same time, as opposed to a fewer amount of posts getting more close votes.

I think that a blockage of 3-5 minutes would be adequate for some queues, and 10-15 for others. You obviously need longer for edits, but if you're just flagging and deleting, you won't need much time. What would be better is it is locked until 1 or 2 minutes of inactivity by the reviewer.

Also, one thing that may work is that when someone is editing a post, it can't be reviewed for a longer period of time, 20 minutes for example, but if they're just flagging it, lock it for 5 minutes

I'm not sure if this is how it works already, but perhaps what we could do in the CV queue is rank posts by number of close votes, so the posts with 4 close votes get reviewed first, and therefore, get closed faster, reducing the number of posts overall in the queue. Of course, the best way to do it is just to get people reviewing as fast as they can, or to have more than one CV reviewing party.

Answer 2

I am all for having some reasonable exclusive time to complete review.

Still, I would like to point that unrestricted locking - "until released" - comes at price. And this price may be quite high, especially in Suggested Edits and Close queues. Unrestricted locking means that particular reviewer can block everyone else from reviewing the post for an hour, or day, or more.

Think of an impact this may have on, say, suggested edits. Imagine a perfectly reasonable post that looks poorly formatted because of minor mistake made by poster, imagine an edit suggested to fix it being blocked by a reviewer who just opened it and went to lunch or sleep.

As time goes by, readers see all the same broken post and vote it down. When blocker-reviewer gets back at last and approves the fix, how much effort is needed to recover the post to "fair" score? Are all who voted it down expected to get back and undownvote? Isn't this too much of a hassle just to make it comfortable for a lazy SOB who just didn't care to perform their duties in time.

Similar damage could be there in close votes review. Imagine a close-worthy post that has a potential to be improved by editing into a better shape. Slow reviewer "holding a lock" may block others from closing it for an hour or day or more. While it hangs there open, it may get answers which in turn will make salvaging edits impossible. As a result, post that could be saved by quick close-edit-reopen, gets locked in a bad shape.

Summing up, I would rather prefer a review lock to be unconditionally released after some specified timeout. If reviewer can't complete their job in 3 (or 5 or 10...) minutes, lock is released anyway and other reviewers get a chance to handle it, too.

_{For the sake of completeness, timeout approach isn't completely painless, either. I sometimes stumble upon posts that take me a long time to review - timing the lock out means I will need to somehow complete review actions outside of the queue. These cases seem to be rare though and I believe it would be a reasonable compromise to let them happen.}

Answer 3

Tasks in some review queues are "locked" to a reviewer for a period of time:

• First Posts
• Late Answers
• Suggested Edits
• Triage (currently enabled only on Stack Overflow)

It should not be necessary for other queues, as a larger number of reviewers is generally desirable in order to complete the task.

All this locks is the dispatcher though; while no other reviewer will be assigned the task for [several minutes], there's nothing stopping anyone from visiting the question directly and taking action on it that invalidates the review, nor reviewers previously assigned the task from returning to it and completing it. This is, I think, a reasonable compromise between the previous behavior (which resulted in many review collisions) and a harder lock (which might easily result in tasks getting "stuck").

Answer 4

Agreed. What you describe is basically a model of pessimistic locking - which prevents reviewers from spending time on a post that afterwards turns out to be "done" already, which is a waste.

The CV queue would become much shorter for each reviewer, which is awesome, too.

A timeout as suggested by gnat would be necessary. 3 minutes are fair enough. It might take longer in some cases , but we would improve the situation for all the other cases.

Additionally I would suggest that there are actually N locks with a separate timeout each. Only when 5 concurrent locks are on the review it disappears from the other's queues. N would equal the number of votes required for the particular queue. (E.g. if 4 votes are required to close a question, 4 concurrent reviewers should be allowed).