Two things I noticed about the 'low quality posts' list on the review tab which would make it easier to use:

  1. I keep seeing the same posts over and over again. I've already looked at them, I know they're fine. It would be nice to be able to hide them on that tab. As people 'approve' it, that should increase its quality score, thereby removing it from the tab altogether.
  2. Markdown is not parsed in the list, so it's impossible to just scan and see which posts contain links. It should be clearer which posts contain links so that the links can be checked.
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I totally agree. I'd also like a paged way of reviewing posts, so that I could know when I've viewed them all. I don't really understand the choice of making the loading of these posts random (everything else on SO is paged and ordered in some way), for me this just makes it harder to go through the posts in an orderly fashion. –  Mia Clarke May 10 '11 at 8:03
If a question has at least one answer or at least one vote it should never appear on the low quality list, and anyone trying to flag it as such should be forced to edit it to make improvements. That second part is not realistic, but I wish they were made to fix whatever issue their pea brains identified. –  Won't May 10 '11 at 13:43
@Will Depends on who upvoted or answered it. A low-quality question with a low-quality answer and upvotes from low-quality users should still appear on this tab. –  Blowski May 10 '11 at 13:59
@Banang I'm sure there is some logic behind it being random. I would have thought it's to ensure that all posts are reviewed, rather than just the most recent ones. –  Blowski May 10 '11 at 14:02
@Blowski: We've got two different users--one who believes the question is low quality, and one who doesn't. From my perspective, they cancel each other out. Why should the flagger's judgement always be considered superior to the one of the person who took the time to understand and answer the question? Reminds me of the ribald saying about everybody being able to go on the floor, but only a superman could hit the ceiling (I'm not going into any more detail about that phrase). –  Won't May 10 '11 at 14:08
@Will Because if all it takes is one answer or upvote to make it harder to flag bad posts, there will be two effects: 1. Spammers will just answer or upvote their posts with sock-puppet accounts. 2. Legit users will submit edits where they should be flagging, making the mods' jobs harder. If a user with 600 flag weight and a rep of 3,000 flags a post of course it should take priority over a user who registered 5 minutes ago and has answered only this question. –  Blowski May 10 '11 at 14:14
@Blowski: Bullski. Spammers will just answer or upvote their posts so what? That has nothing to do with low-quality flags. Spam flags are treated differently by the system. 2. Waaaat? If an edit can fix a low quality post, why on earth should they litter the mod queue with a flag instead?? Besides, I've seen people with lots of rep make lots of stupid pointless flags. Knowing how to invoke a member function at runtime is a different skillset than the one where you don't get pissed off at yet another noob question and flag it as low quality out of aggravation. –  Won't May 10 '11 at 14:30
@Will What if an edit can't fix a low-quality post, but it has a low-quality answer or upvote? Then I wouldn't be able to flag it, only edit. –  Blowski May 10 '11 at 14:34
@Blowski: Aaah, the true issue with my fantasy world. I guess it comes down to my basic displeasure with the "low quality" flag. I believe that in situations where the question is so bad that an edit cannot fix it that what we have isn't a "low quality" question but in fact not a real question. Non-questions should be flagged as such, and not as "low quality." Low quality suggests the quality can be improved. If not, then it isn't just low quality. –  Won't May 10 '11 at 14:44
@Will Which flags to use when is an issue that always confuses me, and I tend to stick to blatant spam, and this question is really about helping me to identify that kind of post. –  Blowski May 10 '11 at 14:49
+1 for proposing to remove approved posts, and also to make links visible. –  Paolo Stefan May 22 '11 at 12:07
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2 Answers

  1. I agree that it would be nice not see the same questions over and over again in the "Review" tab. However, I'm not sure that an "approve" button is the right solution to this problem. That means I have to do even more clicking just to use the page appropriately. I'd prefer that I only have to click on things that I want to flag or edit. The ideal solution is that the system remembers those posts that I've "seen", but on which I took no action.

  2. As for your second suggestion, you can simply expand the post to view the markdown and links by clicking "show full answer". It opens in-line with the normal formatting.

    Simply click here:

    Click on the "show full answer" link

    And bam, you get this:

    The entire post is expanded, with the normal formatting

    If you'd rather see the full answer view all the time, see this feature request. However, I don't support that as it would needlessly increase the visual complexity of the page, making it more difficult for me to scan through the list of answers to be reviewed.

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Some posts have obvious links - "You can read about it here" where here is linked. I know to open and check these. It's the insidious links that are the problem. For example, somebody writes "The so-and-so function in PHP would do this" and links 'so-and-so' to their blog. I need to open the post to check whether it has a link first - which means doing that on every single post. Since low-quality-posts are typically one line long, it should just be there to start with. –  Blowski May 10 '11 at 8:48
The reason I said it should be an active (i.e. you have to click approve) rather than passive (if you don't click disapprove) process is that I frequently miss rubbish posts the first time around. I have no idea how many people use the review tab, so whether there would be enough guaranteed eyes to check it at least once. –  Blowski May 10 '11 at 8:50
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I think code-only short answers (such as on-line code-only answers) should be sent to the bottom of the review queue in general, especially if it's submited by a user with high reputation.

A great deal of short-answers are pretty good answers that are merely a single line of code; if these come from high reputation users, I think we can give them lower priority in the review-queue.

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+1 If a user has more than say 2,000 rep, they are likely to know the difference between a comment and an answer. Even answers like 'yes.' are likely to be good answers. –  Blowski Aug 14 '12 at 7:32
Indeed. We're actually looking at a potential reviewer, so in any case, he could do more damage with bad reviews than bad answers. And other users can still flog the answer if it is poor. –  Hugo Aug 14 '12 at 11:52
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