Experiment: More aggressive review queue indicator

Question

Update on Meta.SE: What criteria should we use to determine which review queue indicator a site will have?

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Over on Meta Stack Exchange, I announced an experiment that would:

• Turn on the review queue indicator whenever there's a task available in any queue.

• All queues with at least one task will be marked with a red dot. There are no grey dots:

  

This will mean you'll be notified of outstanding tasks you can't clear. We are aware of a problem that people will be notified of queues that they don't have the privilege to access. That's next on the list to fix. The goal is to be more aggressive with the indicator to see if we can clear tasks more quickly. Please let us know if we've gone too far.

And in general, we're interested in any feedback to this change: positive, negative or noncommittal.

Answer 1

I'm not sure it's working. I reported it on the meta.se question. So I'm leaving this answer as signpost for the IoT folks.

Answer 2

The more aggressive indicator appears to be working well, and I like it.

While I haven't compared the time to review before and after the change, posts do appear to have been reviewed noticeably quicker, particularly Close Votes. It's particularly helpful on this site, because we have just enough active reviewers to process the queues.

The Close Votes has been a particular problem for us recently, because it could require many reviews to clear a task — recently, one task took over a month to be processed by our reviewers, and I think that was, in part, because no-one realised it was there with the 'grey dot' indicator. Recent reviews seem to have been handled far more quickly, which is a very positive sign.

As a moderator, I find it helpful to know when there are reviews waiting, so we can step in if necessary. For a site like this, knowing if there are any reviews is helpful, so while it might not scale up to other sites, it works well here, and I hope that the change becomes permanent.