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It seems the "First Answers" and "First Questions" tabs were moved into "First Posts".

This is highly inefficient. While I see "first" questions when browsing the chronological order of questions, I'll never be able to get a list of first answers. And late answers don't always include first answers.

Here's why the queue is important: First answers are very likely to be:

  • spam
  • badly formatted
  • not an answer
  • a really good answer that deserves upvoting

… and not recognized as such because they're only on the front page for a certain time. First questions on the other hand are mostly handled fine by the community, because they're easily accessible by clicking on "Newest" in the Questions section.

So please bring back the first answers tab in /review.

It wouldn't be as bad if I at least had the possibility to filter for questions/answers, but there's no way to do so. The current state is just a randomized (sic!) mix of questions and answers, so you're not even always in the right mindset to review properly. "Oh, here's an answer. And now I'm reviewing a question again!" — you can only find out by reading the "review question/answer" link before clicking it.

By merging those queues, a feature was removed — without providing a viable alternative. This is worse than adding new features that make old ones obsolete. In fact, in the current state, I am just not able to review properly anymore. It's no fun. And I enjoyed doing it for the last 6000 posts.

@waffles, please!

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    I honestly don't see any problem with them being merged. This will likely make the reviewing of first questions more frequent. I know I rarely ever visited that tab myself.
    – animuson StaffMod
    May 11, 2012 at 6:56
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    Even if that were the case, I now can't explicitly review first answers. It's just taking basic functionality away without a good reason. I already review every single first question on the site. Don't make me sift through them again just to see the answers. (Yes, the lower traffic on SU allows me to do so)
    – slhck
    May 11, 2012 at 6:57
  • I'm personally hoping the change means they're planning on adding something else there... like the delete tab? ^_^ But I can't say I care either way, so I'm not voting on this.
    – animuson StaffMod
    May 11, 2012 at 6:58
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    I find it hard to get in the correct mindset. When I am reviewing answers I look out for questions and flag them as "Not an Answer". I'm not continually thrown by looking at questions and answers mixed together. The only way you know what you are reviewing is by remembering what you clicked, or scrolling up to see if there is a "Question" shown above - meaning it's an answer.
    – DaveShaw
    May 11, 2012 at 13:07
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    I agree, was surprised to see them merged this morning. I'm visiting the /review tag frequently, but sometimes I'm more enclined to review questions, sometimes answers, as I'm not looking for the same pattern in both. Having them merged just makes it harder to review posts efficiently.
    – Charles Menguy
    May 12, 2012 at 18:08
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    I removed it to make room for "broken links", I will try to add a filter there
    – waffles
    May 14, 2012 at 5:41
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    @waffles With a filter, it'd be possible to filter low quality answers/questions as well, while keeping the number of tabs low. I guess that'd make sense. Thanks for reverting for the time being!
    – slhck
    May 14, 2012 at 7:57

2 Answers 2

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I reverted this change for now, I made it cause I wanted to make room for the "broken links" tab, however I think we can still "just" fit this in once I shortened "Low Quality Posts" to "Low Quality"

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This was really confusing for me - at first I wondered what privilege I'd lost, and how.

I'm not against having first questions and answers combined per se, as I believe you aren't either.

I do agree however, that it was perhaps not the best site update to sneak in with no warning - I rarely read the blog so I don't know if it was mentioned there, but for something like this, why can't we have one of those lovely banners (even if it's just a "Hey, something's changed here - take a look at the blog") like we do with new badges or privileges?

Anyway, since there's loads of white space to the left of the day/week/month filter buttons (see pic with obligatory freehand circle), would it have killed anyone to move the question/answer filter there instead?

EDIT: Looking closer, questions are reasonably clear because they list the Votes/Answers/Views, I still agree that it's a step down in usability from being able to list only questions, or only answers as it requires you to repeatedly reassess what you are looking at, for example, whether the post you're reading that's phrased as a question is actually a question.

While ostensibly, the standards for questions and answers should be the same, different things are required of questions and answers in order to meet that standard.

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    No, combine them if you want, but at least give me a filter ability, like you proposed. Most updates go unnoticed though when they're not even mentioned in the recent changes.
    – slhck
    May 12, 2012 at 19:22
  • Given your update, this mix is actually even worse because now the link doesn't even stay at the same horizontal position. It just looks like a giant mess.
    – slhck
    May 13, 2012 at 8:41
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    I agree - questions are consistent, and answers are consistent, but questions and answers aren't, which wouldn't be so bad if we could filter them. Having the visual indication doesn't make it better; not only do we have to constantly reset our expectations, but we can't even easily scan down a page as items are misaligned.
    – RivieraKid
    May 13, 2012 at 18:02
  • Believe it or not, that's the only way I'm reviewing now. Scroll … ah, something is poking out there … click … scroll … ah, another answer … scroll
    – slhck
    May 13, 2012 at 18:05
  • Oh, I do believe it, unfortunately.
    – RivieraKid
    May 13, 2012 at 19:03
  • There's < 1 blog post a week, so maybe just get the feed?
    – tshepang
    May 17, 2012 at 20:33

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