Are we facing a problem with handling the First Posts Review Queue?

Question

For those who have looked through the stats on First Posts Review Queue, you will notice I sit at the top of most reviewed with over 4500 reviews.

I have over the past months become aware that it was mainly myself doing the bulk of reviewing First Posts. I decided this was not very democratic and decided to limit my activity in that review queue.

However, over the summer I have noticed the number of posts to be reviewed in that queue was increasing quite substantially. I think at one stage it might have peaked at over 50 posts.

The current trend for this review queue seems to be the number of posts to be reviewed balloons up to about 20, and then one or more users, (including myself more recently) steps in and bulk reviews a load of posts.

This does not seem to be a very sustainable approach, ideally lots of users should be reviewing a small number of posts each. Is there something we can do about this?

Answer 1

I agree, and I think the issue extends beyond just First Posts, to a few aspects of community moderation.

There are certainly enough users to handle the queues, if even a small fraction were consistently active in the review queues:

• 249 users who can access the review queues (>= 500 reputation)

• 28 users with close vote privileges (>= 3,000 reputation)

Bearing in mind that only one user is needed to review a First Post, and we only get at most 10–20 questions/day, there are, in theory, sufficient users to handle the flow of questions.

Unfortunately, we can't expect every user with sufficient rep to be here every day. I suspect many of these users haven't been active in months, and far fewer actually visit the site on a day-to-day basis. Even fewer actively contribute to review.

Many review tasks spread across few reviewers leads to the situation we have now, where dedicated users like you have to handle an awful lot by yourself (thank you for doing that, by the way!). So many systems rely on review working, and we need more people to share the load. I've been trying to contribute what I can personally, but the queue always seems full!

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The same seems to be the case for the Close Votes queue (and question closure in general) — it's rare to see a question closed without a binding vote involved, which is unfortunate. Generally, moderators only use their binding votes on blatantly inappropriate posts, and that's a good thing, because ideally users should be able to decide what to close democratically.

In reality, there are probably less than 10 users who actively are able to close questions, which makes it much harder to close questions in a timely fashion and give the authors feedback on how to improve their question.

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So what can we do?

• Ideally, we need more reviewers, and to figure out why people don't review. Is it simply because we need more users here? Are the users here who can review choosing not to? Can we incentivise reviewing?

• I don't feel like loading more reviews on to the users who are doing this already is sustainable. Honestly, reviewing 20 posts a day, every day, just to keep the queue down, stops being fun. The only real solution here is to spread the work across more users, or else the site's bus factor drops dangerously low.

Encouraging people to review is hard, and encouraging people to review well is harder. But a thread like this is a start. Raising attention to the problem is probably the best solution for now, and the new top bar might affect reviewers anyway, so it's worth monitoring.

Answer 2

Welcome to the life of the mods! I've been worried about this issue a lot lately. Honestly, it's not just the First Posts queue; we're having similar issues with the Close Votes queue as well. Unfortunately, there are very few of us doing the vast majority of the work. On top of that, three of the four moderators were on/have been on extended summer vacations.

There haven't been a lot of interesting questions lately, and I think a lot of our older users have gotten bored and moved on. With luck, this will self correct over time. If it doesn't... I honestly don't have a solution to the problem at this time.

Answer 3

The First Posts Review Queue is a waste of time! It may have some meaning on Stack Overflow, but the majority of post on raspberrypi.stackexchange are First Posts.

I skim all questions in the newest "All Questions" queue. I see no need to look at First Posts Review Queue.

I apply the same principle I used at work (when I used to get hundreds of emails from staff); viz. If you want me to READ your post you need to have a Title which describes the issue, and explain your issue in the first paragraph.

I will then provide an answer to any sensible question (if I have something to contribute), but am reluctant to make any other comment these days.

Questions which don't clearly state the issues and provide evidence, and/or exhibit no evidence of research, I silently ignore.

EDIT Today I noticed a red dot on the new toolbar. This turns out to be the First Posts Review Queue, which I never check - so I guess I will have a permanent indicator which effectively hides REAL items to check.