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A question was asked on Meta Stack Overflow today about a duplicate closure of a Stack Overflow question. It was a case of misunderstanding, as the OP thought the question was closed when they were really only being informed of a pending vote or flag.

I went to explain this as another user claimed the question was reopened. The question, according to the revisions, had actually never been closed. The timeline, however, which the other user was looking at, had a confusing line that has since gone away.

Currently, the timeline does not look confusing in the least:

Current question timeline

However, during the course of the exchange on Meta Stack Overflow there was another item above the "comment added" line on the timeline.

I was unable to grab a screenshot of this at the time, but I did manage to find another question with a similar entry in its timeline:

Example of the "close" review link in the timeline

Upon clicking the "close" link in the timeline, the user is taken to the review item for that question. Once the review is done and the timeline is refreshed, the line disappears.

Should everyone be able to see this particular line in the timeline, or is this a bug? This seems like something most users wouldn't even need. For instance, a 400 rep user on Stack Overflow such as myself would have no use for this, as I'm not able to participate in the review to begin with.

For reference, the Meta Stack Overflow question is here.

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Update: it should, but not to the ones that are currently being worked on

As discussed below, it's rather more useful to see links to completed review tasks than those currently in flight. Also doesn't threaten to skew reviews so badly. So that's how we'll do it now: you'll see review tasks linked in the timeline once they're not currently live (completed or invalidated), but won't see them if they're still open to review.

It's very useful for piecing together the history of a post, which is why it's there in the first place. That said, I'm kinda skeptical that it needs to show up while the review is still active - that opens the door to potential spoiling.

IOW, we should probably be showing it after the review is completed (right now it isn't) and hiding it while it's in progress (currently, it's visible).

Interested in others opinions here...

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    Showing it after the review and hiding during would make a lot more sense to me, and be a lot less confusing I think. I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be shown to most of us in the first place, but agree it would be super useful for history purposes.
    – Kendra
    Feb 17, 2016 at 16:37
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    Right now even at >40k on SO, I cannot see that "review" line once the review is done. Even while the review is in effect, the only thing I get when I click on the review line is the opportunity to perform a review (if I've not already done so). So the historical value for a user like me is almost nonexistent. (I presume moderators see everything so I guess it is very useful to them.) It would be useful to show after the review is completed, if clicking it showed the results of the review.
    – Louis
    Feb 17, 2016 at 16:48
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    Depending on how this is squashed, status- meta.stackexchange.com/questions/176131/link-to-review-on-post
    – random
    Mar 3, 2016 at 21:32
  • There is somewhat hard to follow Feature Request here to reverse the implementation you now decided one.
    – rene
    Mar 24, 2016 at 17:11

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