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Does anyone know why this question's reopen review was invalidated?

Can I say "the US people"?

Timeline (before I cast the third and final reopen vote):

  • Post is closed
  • Someone cast a reopen vote, sending the post to the reopen queue
  • Someone else casts a reopen vote from review
  • Mod locks post with a "Comments only" lock
  • Mod moves comments to chat, deleting every comment on the question

Nobody else reviewed the post in queue and there were only 2 reopen votes on it then so I don't see what else could have invalidated the review. No edits, either. This all happened within 24-48 hours and it's pretty clear that no votes expired.

Since this lock doesn't prevent the post from being edited, voted on, closed, or reopened, I think that the review should still be active no matter what the intent of the design was.

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  • 1
    I'm not sure where that additional comment in the FAQ came from / if there is a reference somewhere that suggests the comment lock is supposed to be special cased. But the code does not currently make exceptions for any lock type. Any lock invalidates. Maybe that bit is actually specific to only one queue?
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Mar 21, 2022 at 22:24
  • 3
    @animuson Maybe because the Help Center says it "only prevents new comments from being added to the question or answer that is locked". I'm pretty sure nobody (especially not the moderator who used the lock) was aware that it would cancel the review. (And thus I have edited a little to advocate that we should update how the lock works to not invalidate reviews.)
    – Laurel
    Commented Mar 21, 2022 at 22:42
  • 2
    I agree in principle, it is weird to kick out of review on this. Though I'm not sure how viable the change would be without a database structure change. Afaik we only store LockedDate so that's the only easy thing to filter on without diving into PostHistory, which is too expensive to do when trying to quick-filter the entire table of questions.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Mar 22, 2022 at 1:34
  • @animuson Does this mean that it's not possible to review a (comment) locked post in any queue? Like after someone cast the first close/reopen vote on a locked post.
    – Laurel
    Commented Mar 22, 2022 at 1:41
  • 1
    I only checked the reopen queue, but I imagine the same basic logic is used on all queues to exclude locked posts.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Mar 22, 2022 at 2:06
  • The help center page and official statements from the team, which stated that the only ramification of such locks was disabling comments, and that's what I based the edit on (cc @V2Blast).
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Mar 22, 2022 at 2:34

1 Answer 1

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TL;DR

A comment lock should invalidate a reopen review because it prevents users from communicating whether the question should be reopened, resulting in poor choices.

Hypothetical situation: A bad question is posted and closed, but low-rep users are arguing with high-rep users in the comments to get the question reopened because they have an answer. Eventually the low-rep users win the argument and a reopen vote is cast, because the high-rep users missed a key point. A mod comes and comment-locks the post. A very high-rep user sees the question in the reopen queue and chooses "Leave it Closed" because of the missed key point. Because of the comment lock, nobody gets to know this reason, so the question is reopened and placed straight back into the Close queue by the very high rep user, creating extra work for the community. This is bad.

To prevent this from happening to reopen-worthy posts, the mods can receive a notice when attempting to comment-lock the post:

This question is in the Reopen review queue. Are you sure you want to comment-lock it? Doing this will remove it from the queue.

If a question is truly reopen-worthy, the mod would reopen it before comment-locking it if he is made aware of the situation. The mod would probably be able to consider all the possible reasons why it should be closed. If it is not reopen-worthy, removing it from the queue reduces work for the community.

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