Review bans should escalate beyond 30 days

Question

Currently, as reviewers fail audits, they are banned from review for increasing durations (2 days, then 7, then 30). At present, this caps out at 30 days. The next time a reviewer is banned, the ban duration drops down to 2 days. Even moderators cannot hand out review bans of longer than 30 days.

Over at Stack Overflow, we have quite a few users who have been banned from review 20+ times. All of them kept coming back after being banned, since they knew they could just wait out each 30 day ban and proceed to game reviews after that. For example, I saw this in the history for one user today:

Jan 21  user has been banned from review    duration = 30 days
Jan 11  user has been banned from review    duration = 7 days
Jan 4   user has been banned from review    duration = 7 days
Dec 5 '15   user has been banned from review    duration = 30 days
Nov 27 '15  user has been banned from review    duration = 7 days
Nov 25 '15  user has been banned from review    duration = 2 days
Oct 21 '15  user has been banned from review    duration = 30 days
Oct 14 '15  user has been banned from review    duration = 7 days
Oct 12 '15  user has been banned from review    duration = 2 days
Sep 11 '15  user has been banned from review    duration = 30 days
Sep 3 '15   user has been banned from review    duration = 7 days
Sep 1 '15   user has been banned from review    duration = 2 days

Moderators receive no notification of these serial review abusers, so we have no idea what they're doing until we happen across their ban history. We've been instructed to start suspending their main account on repeated review bans, but without a way of knowing this is happening, that's a limited way of preventing them from causing damage to the site.

Therefore, I'm requesting that we allow for further escalation of the review ban duration past 30 days. This would require extending the sliding window on which bans are calculated. At present, this is 30 days, but that window could scale with the duration of the last review ban.

I'd like to see an escalation on the order of 2 days -> 7 days -> 30 days -> 60 days -> 365 days and the ability of moderators to impose manual review bans of up to 365 days, in line with our ability to suspend accounts for up to 365 days.

Moderators can always manually remove review bans, so if someone is trapped by a series of unfortunate circumstances (bad audits, etc.), we can still override the system.

I really do think we need a better way to stop the harm that certain abusive reviewers are causing to sites when they aren't deterred by the current review ban cycle.

Answer 1

Starting today, thanks to Oded, moderators now have a way to give extended bans from review. When manually banning a user from the mod tools, moderators will see a list of options similar to what is shown when suspending a user:

Not only can you hand out longer bans, we've also adjusted the way automatic bans are handed out to users who fail audits. When calculating the automatic length of the ban, we check to see when the last ban ended and determine the new length based on the following requirements:

• If the time since the last ban ended is less than or equal to 30 days, then the new ban is double the length of the last one. This is not capped, meaning if the last ban was for 365 days, then the new one is 730.
• If the time since the last ban ended is greater than 30 days, then the new ban is half the length of the last ban or 2 days - whichever is greater.

This should help with reviewers who continually fail audits and need extended time away from reviewing. It also allows moderators to 'reset' the ban length by handing out a ban of any length, which would then be used by the automatic calculation of time-off.

Answer 2

I think this is a very good idea. However, I think that the ban level should go down after a few months. Everyone can make mistakes on occasion, I think I've been a few times very near a review ban (at least I failed a few consecutive audits) on the close queue because the site changed it viewpoint on homework and the reviews were old posts.

So I propose this:

• Users start at level 1.
• After every ban, it goes up by one level.
• After 90 days after the last ban ended, it decreases by one level.

Maybe this should only happen at level 2 (when the level is 3 or higher, it can't be a mistake, then it has to be robo-reviewing, or just very careless reviewing).

Answer 3

This sounds like a suitably rare occurrence that it should be enough to just raise an automatic mod flag on the ban immediately following a 30 day ban. There should be few enough cases that it wouldn't be burdensome for an actual person to evaluate these case. If it's clear that the user is a serial abuser demonstrating no intention of rectifying their behavior, then extremely severe actions can be taken at that time, and if it's a user that's clearly doing their best, but just making more mistakes than they really should be, the mod can respond appropriately to aid the user in understanding what they're doing wrong and taking the appropriate steps to learn how to improve.

Answer 4

Since my previous ban ended I reviewed about 450 items and passed many audits.

Quoting this comment:

Based on this discussion, if I come out of a ban and sit on my laurels without reviewing for 30 days, I'm going to have a higher review rep then someone who comes out of a ban and starts reviewing immediately - crazy – danday74 Oct 30, 2018 at 8:50

Well eventually failed this audit and banned! 60 days.

Therefore, I would suggest taking passed audits and review counts in the calculations.