TOS/Community Policy on Review Bots?

Question

I have noticed that there is a bit of a "fastest guns in the west" approach to the review queues on this site. They empty very quickly. I think we have some dedicated members who really care about making this community great, but it also seems like some users must be using bots to monitor the queues. I couldn't find any way to subscribe to an RSS feed, so unless someone is sitting around spamming F5, I don't understand how they clear so dang fast.

I'm curious about two things:

1. Would a user get banned if it were determined they used a bot to monitor/clear review queues?
2. What habits/tools do people use to monitor these queues in general?

I don't want to accuse anyone, I just want to know what people are doing to track this stuff, because the site isn't really built to streamline it.

Answer 1

Excellent question Adrian. I make a point of not voting to close questions prematurely. I think it important that we give users time to respond to questions asking them to clarify their post or provide missing information. I also look at answers to questions in the queue that are marked as duplicates. If the answers are valid and useful, I think most of those questions should remain open. Everyone asks questions differently. Different keywords and phrases are more meaningful to them. Quite often, newer answers are much better than the referenced answer to the "duplicate" question, in my view, making it unwise to close the question.

Like you, I don't know how some seem to get to these posts so quickly. Apparently they have nothing better to do. While it's a task that needs to be done, it also needs to be done with using judgement, applying thought and exercising restraint.

Answer 2

To be honest, I don't think that anyone out there is using bots to do reviews.

Usually when I click over to the review page, there are a handful of close votes and low quality posts, and usually most of them are border-line cases and I usually just skip past most of them (and I'm sure other people do as well). I think if we had a bot problem, those queues would always be cleared with the bots making arbitrary choices.

I think the other queues clear so quickly because

1. the first posts and late answers only need one reviewer and it's usually easy to see what action should be taken
2. there are very few reopen votes
3. the suggested answers have that orange box that shows up on the non-review pages so that people are more likely to notice it