Why on the client side there is a field called "isAudit" when reviewing?

Question

When reviewing anything on any site from the platform (Stack Exchange) there are ajax POST requests to http://[site-name]/review/next-task.

The interesting part is that in the JSON response there is a field called isAudit that can be true or false.

This made me curious and I verified when it is true. It is true only the task is audit.

Running a small script in browser console, you will be able to know if the task is an audit or not.

$(document).ajaxSuccess(function(a, b, c, d) {
    var isAudit = d.isAudit;

    if (isAudit === undefined) { return; }

    if (!isAudit) {
         // no audit
         return;
    }

    // the task is an audit
    alert("STOP! This task is an audit.");
});

My question is: is this a known issue? I believe that is little bug in the reviewing system.

Answer 1

Because audits run different JS. They have to, since they work a bit differently.

There are two alternatives to this that make the whole thing server side:

• Make note of every request the user sends from any review page. For example, if the user clicks "flag" from the review page, the server will then check if it is an audit and show the flag dialog or pass/fail the audit depending on the audit status. This gets a bit complicated as the system would require some changes to the utilities like flagging/comment voting that are common to all. Currently, on audit pages, votes and all do not send requests to the server until the audit is passed/failed.

• Only pass/fail audits when the user has clicked "done" or has completed any action that would otherwise complete a normal review. This would require some work to smartly spoof the rest of the dialogs, and I bet someone would find chinks in this method, too.

Instead, we have better methods of catching users who use this to robo review, I think Shog mentioned that he had a script for rooting out audit-cheaters. Besides, mods have some other analytics about the queues that are pretty useful in catching those who automate reviewing.