All good things must come to an end and so must the review queues project. This project would not have been successful without the community. Thank you all for the hours of reviewing, testing, and sharing your feedback along the way. With that said, this will be our final major release. In this post, I’ll summarize the changes we’ve made to the overall queue workflows and the specific adjustments to the Reopen votes queue.
Changes to the First posts queue
First posts → First questions AND First answers queue
- To avoid context switching, and recognizing that asking and answering require slightly different skill sets, we are creating two separate queues to handle the individual post types.
- The purpose of these queues remains the same – helping new users learn how to use the site. With that in mind, reviewers will be able to choose from three actions: Looks OK, Edit, and Share feedback.
- It can take time to develop the skills to write a good question or answer. A user’s first few posts may require extra attention and to help new users get the hang of things, First questions and First answers will accept up to three posts per user if their first couple aren’t successful.
- Reviewers are encouraged to leave comments for the post-author, but now they can also choose from a few options of canned feedback which will appear as a comment from the Community account.
Changes to the Reopen votes queues
“Significant edit” option
This feature appears when editing a closed question and allows editors to indicate if they’re making a minor edit (i.e. grammar, spelling) or a significant edit. By submitting an edit for review, the editor agrees that their edit attempts to resolve the question’s close reason(s) and should be considered for reopening in the Reopen votes queue.
Once a significant edit has been submitted, editors are still able to return to the edit screen and make further adjustments. Significant edit status will also be indicated in both revision history and post timeline pages.
Significant edits in the Suggested edits queue
- Users who do not have enough reputation to submit an edit outright will have their significant edits go into the Suggested edits queue accompanied by a post notice.
- Actions in the Suggested edits queue will change based on whether the edit has been flagged as a Significant edit. In the case of a Significant edit, reviewers will be able to Approve and reopen or Approve and leave closed.
- It takes two approve votes (any combination of Approve and reopen or Approve and leave closed) to remove the task out of the Suggested Edits queue. If at least one of the votes is Approve and reopen, a new task will be created in the Reopen votes queue.
Leave closed reasons
- If a Reopen votes reviewer elects to leave a question closed, the reviewer will be presented with a “Leave closed reason” modal (similar to the close reason modal) that will return feedback to the editors. For example, if a question was originally closed because it lacked details, it may still require further details even after an edit, or new issues with the question might present themselves like asking too many questions at once.
- In addition to inbox notifications, the closed question’s post notice will also be updated with more information.
Multiple opportunities to send question for review
We’ll be launching this feature without any limits – users will be able to submit multiple edits on individual posts. We’ll take a look at the data in a few weeks to see if any abuse of the feature has occurred and take mitigation steps as needed.
[Stack Overflow only] Reviewers will not see posts that
- they’ve voted to reopen since last closed, and
- voted to close since the post was last edited.
Moderators are exempt from this restriction.
Bug fix: “Don't cause the reopen vote of the user, whose edit pushed the closed question into the reopen queue, to invalidate the review”
This bug fix is also included as part of this release. You can read Kyle’s detailed response here.
Other changes to the Review queues
Turn off the Help & improvement queue
- H&I has been our least productive queue. Over the last 90 days, only 9 tasks went into the queue each day on average, compared with 2,215 for First Posts (our busiest queue) and 188 for Reopen Votes (our second-to-last busiest). Consequently, this queue will be turned off. It will remain in the listing until its current items are exhausted, and will then be removed. History for and badges awarded from this queue will remain as they are.
- With the addition of the First questions queue, we expect that questions with potential can get the same assistance they need more quickly.
- Questions that would have ended up in this queue from Triage (with a Needs community edit action) will now enter the First questions queue.
New actions for Late answers queue
The Late answers queue has been successful in identifying and removing low quality posts, repeat answers, and spam. Reviewers were able to take any number of actions on a task, so the objective of this queue wasn’t all that obvious. To clear up any ambiguity and focus on identifying problematic answers, we’ve defined three actions: Looks OK, Edit, and Delete.
Keep Triage queue (Stack Overflow only)
- Triage will continue to handle questions only.
- Triage will be available on all sites, but only turned on by default on Stack Overflow. Have a meta discussion and ask a moderator to status-review if your site wishes to add the Triage queue.
Name change: Low quality posts → Low quality answers (Stack Overflow only)
This queue will continue to handle answers only.
Misc. We won't issue new Reviewer or Steward badges for the queues that were turned off, but this won’t have any effect on badges already earned in these respective queues.
Along with all these changes, here is an updated visual of the Review queues map –
What about issue X, Y, Z?
As mentioned earlier, this is our final major release. We will not be pursuing the proposed suggested tasks feature at this time. We didn't feel that it was going to significantly increase curation activities on the site and therefore didn't warrant the high development cost.
There are still a few outstanding issues related to suggested edits that have proved to be technically challenging. We’ll respond in those original Meta request posts as soon as we decide on a course of action.
Feedback
Please leave your feedback and any bugs you may discover related to this release below this post. We will be monitoring this post until Friday, September 10th. Report any further issues after September 10th as new questions on Meta.
