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I've experienced this almost daily on Stack Overflow, and now I believe I've recently figured out the pattern of this bug.

Requirements:

  • over 10,000 reputation if the low quality post is a question (it almost never happens)
  • over 20,000 reputation in general, in order to have access to delete votes for answers.
  • not a ♦ user, because you need a finite amount of votes for this issue.

Steps:

Visit the low quality queue and when you cast your LAST "Delete" vote of the day (not the "Recommend Deletion" vote), then an error occurs:

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

Refreshing the page demonstrates that the review got invalidated:

This item is not reviewable.

For reference, the review item was: https://stackoverflow.com/review/low-quality-posts/24697740. As I'm not a moderator, I do not know if the original flag became "helpful", "disputed" or something else.

It may be possible that it actually happens for the LAST+1 Delete vote (I didn't count precisely), but in any case it seems like some off-by-one error somewhere: if it's the last+1 vote, then the review queue should be considering it as "Recommend Deletion" instead of invalidating the review.

Please accept my apologies for not recognizing the bug earlier: I believe I've accidentally invalidated many reviews like that in the past months because I can do 20 reviews a day, but I have less than 20 delete votes a day, and as such potentially triggering the issue daily.

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The cause here is a sanity-check which attempts to verify that a given review action is actually valid for that review: for a LQ answer, that means a Delete action is only valid if you have delete privileges, the answer scores <=0, and you still have delete votes remaining for the day; a RecommendDelete action is only valid if one or more of the above are not true.

Here's where it went wrong: when the review task is shown, you have one vote left, Delete is a valid action, so the Delete option is shown; by the time this is checked, you've used your last vote, and Delete is invalid.

The fix here is to treat Delete as a valid action when you've already voted to delete the answer, even if you're out of votes.

Related (but subtly different): Can't complete First Post review when reaching the daily vote limit

This will be fixed after the next build.

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