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Unfortunately, I don't have an example. The question/answer that precipitated this was removed, although I'm not sure by whom.

The concept of reviewing 1st posts/answers is, presumably, that the community at large should monitor these first posts to make sure they are acceptable. Of course, there are "badge gamers" who are just looking to review as many as possible so they can achieve certain badges. This is evident when you come across a REALLY, SUPREMELY crappy question or answer and it's from a brand new user.

My question/suggestion/discussion point is; should there be some sort of penalty for accepting an obviously horrible question/answer put against the person who reviewed it? For instance (and this is open for discussion), if you come across a really bad question/answer from a first-time user, you can flag it as "Shouldn't have passed review". If a reviewer gets 10 flags, they lose the ability to review for a set time period.

My concept here is; you're not serving the community at large if you're passing a bunch of reviews that shouldn't have passed. I know there are audits slipped in now and again, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. I'm not saying I'm perfect; I've failed an audit or 2 myself. But if I hit a question that I really don't understand (i.e. about technology that I don't know and so I have no idea if it's worded properly), I hit the "Skip" button and let someone else with more knowledge tackle it. I sense there's a fair amount of people here who just hit the "Approve" button and go on their way, and they're not helping anyone by doing that.

EDIT - I'm copy/pasting this from an answer below because, while along the same lines, it's actually an improvement over my initial idea.

I think the OPs point in this case is that you don't need to know who reviewed any given post, but in the current setup it would be equal to letting the system reflect poorly on a reviewer if a "No action needed"-post then got flagged (and approved) as ie. VLQ. – Anders UP

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  • 3
    who and how would decide if it "Shouldn't have passed review"?
    – user221081
    Sep 19, 2013 at 15:47
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    I'm thinking that would just be a new flag option. Just like anyone can flag for any reason, maybe one of the flag reasons should be that it "shouldn't have passed review".
    – Johnny Bones
    Sep 19, 2013 at 15:50
  • @JohnnyBones why do you have this tagged "Review Audits"? Are you talking about reviews of actual posts or audit questions?
    – psubsee2003
    Sep 19, 2013 at 15:53
  • @psubsee2003 - I just assumed since it was technically about reviewing audits, that tag might fit. ~shrugs~
    – Johnny Bones
    Sep 19, 2013 at 15:57
  • The fact the question swiftly disappeared suggests it probably was correctly reviewed; with a flag that ultimately ended up in a deletion
    – Richard Tingle
    Sep 19, 2013 at 15:58
  • @JohnnyBones your question is more about auditing reviewers, that tag might be ok, but disputed review audits isn't.
    – psubsee2003
    Sep 19, 2013 at 16:00
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    I think you might misunderstand how the first posts review queue works. First posts do not wait until they are reviewed and approved to go up. They are posted immediately, and are then added to the queue so that reviewers can see whether action is needed.
    – David Robinson
    Sep 19, 2013 at 16:00
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    When flagging the post how do you know that the reviewer actually approved of it? For all you know the reviewer of that post did flag it for mod attention, or commented on it suggesting improvements, or downvoted it, etc. That post may also not be a first post; perhaps it's a second and the first post was deleted. The fact that you're seeing a first post that's bad doesn't mean it passed a reivew.
    – Servy
    Sep 19, 2013 at 16:02
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    As a first post reviewer I don't have the option of saying "delete this now", I can comment, vote, or flag. None of which would prevent it being on the site. I would feel slightly hard done by being blamed for letting something onto the site when I had no power to stop it
    – Richard Tingle
    Sep 19, 2013 at 16:02
  • @RichardTingle If the system handled this automatically, it would be an audit after the fact. In essence, if this was flagged (and subsequently closed) with OPs Should have failed review or VLQ or similar and you had clicked No action needed, then it would reflect poorly. If you had flagged yourself, had downvoted or even just commented, it shouldn't reflect on you.
    – user213634
    Sep 19, 2013 at 16:09
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    @AndersUP The mods already do that; looking at reviews that are no-actioned of posts later deleted, and if it's a pattern, the user can be manually banned. Presumably they could automate the process if they felt it was overly burdensome.
    – Servy
    Sep 19, 2013 at 16:12
  • @Servy Cool, I didn't know that they routinely looked at those.
    – user213634
    Sep 19, 2013 at 16:15
  • Nor did I; hence my question. :o)
    – Johnny Bones
    Sep 19, 2013 at 16:17
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    Related Give moderators the ability to mark reviews as “bad” and specifcally the answer by Brad larson - "There's one specific case where this could even be automated. For answers in the "Late Answers" and "First Posts" queue, I would like some sort of marking or identification when a user votes "No Action Needed" on a post that is later flagged as spam / offensive and then deleted. ..."
    – user213963
    Sep 19, 2013 at 16:47
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    And once we ding people who approve bad posts, we need to ding people who incorrectly dinged people who approved good posts. Then we'll have to ding people who incorrectly dinged people for dinging someone that approved a bad post. But eventually - eventually - we should get down to one person who can handle watching the watchers watching the watchers watching the watchers... watchers and this one person's final say will be ultimate. But we'll need to watch them carefully, so...
    – Pollyanna
    Sep 19, 2013 at 16:49

4 Answers 4

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For instance (and this is open for discussion), if you come across a really bad question/answer from a first-time user, you can flag it as "Shouldn't have passed review".

Just because a bad post existed doesn't mean it was reviewed.

  1. Questions/Answers are reviewed after they are posted not before so it is possible it wasn't reviewed yet
  2. Just because a post was reviewed, that doesn't mean the post stops existing. The reviewer might have flagged it, downvoted it, left a comment that got deleted, voted to close it, or suggested an edit that hasn't been approved (or was rejected)
  3. The poster might not have gone through review (i.e. maybe they aren't a first time poster, maybe they had a post deleted)
  4. Although unlikely, maybe the post was edited after it was reviewed (would be rare, and should be visible through the revision history, but still a possibility).

The point is you might see a bad question, but you don't know if it was reviewed and when. So if you flag it as a bad review, you might just have the moderators running in circles trying to figure out who reviewed it and when, and if the flag was older than the review.

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I'm not sure there's a new question here, but:

  1. The site is moderated by the user base with review privileges
  2. The elected moderators can review decisions in bulk and in detail as they see fit.
  3. Anyone can flag a post and review edits to raise issues.
  4. The community team oversees and can review the same review statistics and details that the elected moderators can.
  5. The developers can do the same.
  6. All of the above are indirectly or directly accountable both to the leadership of Stack Exchange as well as the user base as a whole since anyone can watch for bad edits and take action.
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Moderators already have the ability to suspend people from the review queues manually, and you have the means to determine if a user is auto-reviewing by looking at his review activity (from http://site.stackexchange.com/users/USERID/USERNAME?tab=activity&sort=reviews).

If you feel that a specific user is being offensive in that matter, simply custom flag and a moderator will have a look and take necessary action.

I don't feel as though removing the moderator from the equation here is needed just yet.

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  • "If you feel that a specific user is being offensive in that matter, simply custom flag and a moderator will have a look and take necessary action." I'm not suggesting automation, what I'm suggesting/opening for discussion is whether or not a new flag should be created specifically for poor audits. I guess the custom flag is an option too.
    – Johnny Bones
    Sep 19, 2013 at 15:48
  • @JohnnyBones: By "automation" I mean "not require moderator intervention", sorry if that was unclear, I'll edit. But yeah, I don't feel a new flag should be created for this purpose.
    – Madara's Ghost
    Sep 19, 2013 at 15:50
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    I think the OPs point in this case is that you don't need to know who reviewed any given post, but in the current setup it would be equal to letting the system reflect poorly on a reviewer if a "No action needed"-post then got flagged (and approved) as ie. VLQ.
    – user213634
    Sep 19, 2013 at 15:55
  • @AndersUP - That wasn't exactly what I had in mind, but it's an improvement over my initial idea.
    – Johnny Bones
    Sep 19, 2013 at 16:01
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Unfortunately, I don't have an example. The question/answer that precipitated this was removed, although I'm not sure by whom.

I think this may be the answer which triggered your concern. The author of that answer deleted it after your comment:

Whoever approved this first answer by this user should have their rights revoked. It's not even the right language!

Your comment was useful in that it pointed out that his c# answer was not useful for a question clearly tagged with MS Access and VBA tags.

That comment and the downvote (was that yours or mine?), was enough to persuade him his answer was not useful, so he removed it.

And later the question was deleted by its author for an apparently unrelated reason.

So now I think the issue is whether more should be done to prevent/discourage approval of useless first time answers. If so, I suggest that deleted answer is a poor case to justify any changes. It was dealt with appropriately and pretty darn quickly.

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