Error Message when downvoting then recommending deletion in Low Quality Answers/Posts is misleading

Question

I was served a review in Low Quality Answers on Stack Overflow.

The post had a score of +1. This makes it ineligible for deletion, so the review options that were served to me were "Looks OK", "Edit", and "Recommend deletion".

As part of the review, I downvoted the post (making it now score 0) and then clicked "Recommend deletion" and "Submit"

It gave me an error message:

An error occurred when reviewing this item. Please try again.

I tried a few more times to no avail. I refreshed the page and was served new options "Looks OK" "Edit" and "Delete"

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Needing to refresh appears to be the expected behaviour (or at least the current known workflow) to update the review options according to Unable to downvote *and* vote to delete from the review page as it used to work

However, this implementation has some issues:

1. Without Meta knowledge it's really unclear what you're supposed to do. The "Please try again." text is incorrect; no matter how many times you try, the review will not complete unless the post becomes ineligible for deletion (again) or you refresh the page.
2. It's a clunky user experience to have to refresh the page in order to continue with the review. Also this is not, to my knowledge, part of the standard workflow in any other review queue.

Can we either:

1. responsively update the review options from "Recommend deletion" to "Delete" based on the current eligibility of the post without needing to refresh the page, or
2. give a tailored error message letting the user know they should refresh the page rather than try to submit the review again?

I understand that this is a rare situation as this is:

1. a low quality post,
2. that happens to have a positive score on load,
3. that is within one downvote of eligibility for review deletion, and
4. the reviewer downvotes the post, and has both deletion privileges and delete votes left for the day

However, it is because this is such a rare occurrence finding information on what to do/what happened is difficult and built-in advice (or other automatic handling) would be greatly beneficial when it does happen.

Answer 1

I've just pushed a change to hopefully improve the behavior here a little bit: now if an action is no longer available, you should see a proper error message, and the list of actions should be updated (a bit of both your suggestions!).

So in your example, you would see an error message letting you know that the "Recommend deletion" action is no longer available, and the sidebar should be refreshed with the "Delete" option now being shown.

We discussed internally if we should just take the action for the reviewer, but decided that it's best if the reviewer knows exactly what they are submitting.

Thank you for reporting this, we appreciate the help!