18
After clicking around a bit through Andrew's link, I found this explanation of how the Late Answers Review queue works:
The way the late answers queue works is by checking two things.
Was the answer posted at least 30 days after the question was asked?
Was the answer posted by a user who has 10 or less reputation (disregarding suspension) [but see below]
...
17
The direct answer is that yes, moderators can cast unlimited numbers of votes to close, reopen, delete, or undelete posts because these are considered moderation activities. You must just have been unaware of this, but it has always been that way. Actual votes are still limited in the normal way, however.
Most of the time I don’t use the review queues for ...
14
Perhaps some review queue reviewers who feel that the site is overrun with cruddy questions are loath to waste any of their allotted 20 daily review votes on keeping acceptable questions open, since doing so would mean having fewer votes left to close unacceptable questions with. If so, they may be inclined to skip questions that, if they had unlimited votes ...
12
Skipping is definitely not dissolute.
You have at least considered the post and consciously decided that you cannot honestly pass an opinion. This has to be better for the site than clicking either the exterminate or the keep button without proper consideration.
12
It's much less bad than you can see in your view. Moderators can also see which reviews were deliberately skipped.
I can't tell you specifics, but on average for every two or three entries you do see, there's another you aren't seeing where the reviewer has deliberately passed on a review decision because they've elected to skip it.
11
I think it is broke, and this would be worth at least trialling.
Currently there are over 160 questions in the review queue. I confess I don't use the queue much; I simply don't have the time and since my vote is a binding vote and designed for exception-handling, I would far rather that the community policed itself.
If there aren't sufficient members who ...
11
In clicking "No Action Needed" you make a judgement, and the system will use your judgement to help decide what action to take in respect of a post. It may be that your click, when combined with other those of other reviewers, tips the system into taking no action (removing the post from the review queue entirely).
By clicking "Skip" you are declining to ...
9
I've often thought that a "weak" close would be useful - a way for folks with some knowledge in a given area to quickly take a new question off the table so that it could be discussed, edited, etc.
One way to prevent abuse would be to make the question re-open instantly if it was edited. Another would be to simply allow anyone with similar experience in ...
9
Choosing No Action Needed is not a behavior that needs to be done less, but rather more appropriately. In the instructions, it says "when this post needs no action from you." Interpreted generously, this action is applicable in all cases. Because review work is volunteer, technically no posts need action from any one user. However, this action actually means ...
9
Even after reading the community manager guidance in When Should I Vote to Delete, this still doesn't strike me as a high-value activity. Some might consider these questions "broken windows", but if the broken window is tucked away in the basement and you only see it when you specifically search for that kind of window, is it really that harmful to the site?...
9
Things get in the CVRQ by having a close vote cast or a close flag cast. They stay there until they get enough Leave Opens or Closes, or are closed, or expire.
It was 322 when I last looked at it. We average two days to close things here:
Over Closed Asked Percent
1d 12 65 18.46 %
2d 51 129 39.52 %
7d 174 435 40.00 %
14d 363 ...
9
Would ELU like to start a trial of only need 3 votes to close/reopen a question?
Update April 30, 2021
Community Managers are working to implement this now.
No, thank you.
To close a question all that is needed are five users with at least 3,000 rep. Just five people out of hundreds or maybe thousands of regular users. Users can cast up to 24 votes per ...
8
This is perhaps an inevitable affliction of mature Stack Exchange sites. The closure review queue grows due to a confluence of several factors.
I have found that empirically, user reputation scores follow a power law distribution, or something close to it. Here is a histogram; the same histogram plotted on a log-log scale looks roughly linear. This means ...
7
@Mari-Lou A wrote:
Several links in my posts have been fixed by this user, and I've always given the green light. Fixing a corrupt link is nearly always a good thing, regardless of the post or author's status. I don't think the edits have got out of hand.
@Sven wrote:
Edits are supposed to make a post significantly better, and correcting a bad link is ...
7
Although implementing this proposal carries obvious risks, it is worth trying because it promises to reduce the number of questions that are closed after being answered.
The purpose of closing seems to be to prevent the questions that do not belong to this site from being answered on it. When the concept of closing was built into the framework of the Stack ...
7
I can't deny I've been remiss in not going through the review queue so often lately.
But when I do tackle the "Closevote" queue, I invariably hit my daily limit (20 VTC), because the queue is so long. And that really irritates me, because it means I can't VTC against current questions, as they arise.
Perhaps I should post my thoughts as a "Feature Request" ...
6
It's because it had a net positive score at the time that six recommends were racked up.
There's a notice on it. Eventually if the user doesn't return pretty soon and fix it up, it will probably be deleted, either by three 20k users once it's negative, or by a moderator.
6
I was hoping that the powers above The Powers That Be could reverse the settings, but apparently they cannot.
Please roll back this change immediately. We have now a 3.2k entries long review queue on ServerFault. That's total crap. – Sven 10 hours ago
Reverting won't help, I'm afraid. The damage has been done. I have gone over to pitch in on Server ...
5
Based upon Jeff Atwood's answer to Should Available Close Votes Be a Function of Inflation or Rep?, made in 2011, I surmise that the answer to the titular question is yes, it is possible. Sci-Fi and Super-User had 24 close votes back when the default number of close votes was 12, meaning that the number can be set on a per-site basis if nothing has changed ...
5
This site gets lots of new users who post questions which aren't up to scratch. I would guess that a long term average of 40% closed is on the high end across the network.
Perhaps something that could be considered would be a site-specific lowering of the number of votes required to close questions. If questions needed only 3-4 close votes the queue would ...
5
Should I hit "looks okay" to clear it from the queue and give the suggestion some time, or should I hit "skip" to keep it in the queue?
You be the judge.
Review process takes a while. If the OP returns to edit, click "looks okay". Else, "recommend deletion". "Skip" delays the review process, until someone else attends to it.
I, personally, would leave a ...
5
I'm a frequent close voter, and I think it's worth a try.
There's a double-layered effect where misdirected questions often get answers that are of poor quality, which further increases the queue length. This will prevent some of those from ever getting in the queue.
I began focusing more on cleaning that answering when I noticed that google hits on ...
5
The evident purpose of this proposal is to make it easier to close bad questions quickly. To the extent that it would promote that goal without producing undesirable side effects, I have no objection to it—and I can't imagine that any other EL&U participant would object to it either.
The problem is that EL&U's built-in options for voting to close a ...
4
...as of a week later from posting, we're down to ~70. Keep going!!
Wow...WTH. Did I say something wrong?
831 Late Answers
StackExchange implemented a change to the way they evaluate late answers:
Can we raise the bar for reputation for late answers to bypass the review queue?
TL;DR: As of today (September 29, 2015) the maximum reputation for ...
4
I am a compulsive tidy-upper and throw-it-awayer, so I jumped on the Delete Queue enthusiastically and voted to delete five questions I thought had no redeeming qualities. I was too hasty on one of them, because the f-word turns me off, utterly. Not a good reason, as @Mari-Lou A pointed out above. The answers were worthy of keeping.
Fortunately, I was ...
4
The requirements for close-voting have only been reduced recently, but already I have experienced expedited closure for off-topic questions, and I can say it's already it's an improvement. Much better user experience from a moderation perspective.
4
The easiest way is to open the review page in an incognito/private browser window.
3
I don't see why OP wants the option of voting to delete insufficiently-detailed answers. If they're not actually wrong, just don't upvote them.
If the lack of detail really bothers you, you can always downvote. If several people do this and the answer ends up with a significantly negative vote tally, higher-rep users will get the option to delete it without ...
3
If I am working through a queue, it is precisely because I am judicious that you'll see four closevotes from me in three seconds. It's because I haven't looked at four questions in three seconds, I've looked at twelve and skipped eight, in some cases merely because they had more than two lines of text in it.
I do not labor in the queues; I swipe the low-...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible