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Did something break?

This morning there were about 2, now there seem to be 1200 Late Answers.

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  • I've quickly gone through the first few, just to see what they may contain. I don't at a glance see anything that would bring them to review, so I'm suspecting a glitch. They may have been considered late at the time of writing, but there are ones going back several years.
    – Tetsujin
    Sep 29, 2015 at 19:26
  • I believe the rep limit was raised from 10 to 50 and that was combined with a month of reviews being dumped in the queue at once. Also, it appears that the change was intentional and we should work through the queue as a community. Feel free to ignore the review tab and not over-eat from the buffet of answers. Gavage isn't pretty...
    – bmike Mod
    Sep 29, 2015 at 19:30
  • Ahaah! Yes, I'd been going through trying to see a commonality & now you mention it - low rep users' answers. I thought I couldn't see anything inherently wrong in them themselves [I wasn't being greatly concerned with hidden gems/spam etc, as they really weren't ringing those bells.]
    – Tetsujin
    Sep 29, 2015 at 19:34
  • Dammit, now I've found one I would have flagged, had I been here in Feb '13, as 'not an answer' - I need to stop now ;)
    – Tetsujin
    Sep 29, 2015 at 19:37
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    Only stop if you find your standards lowering - this review is critical for fixing bad questions and bad answers, so be sure to skip a review if you think it needs more attention than you can give it!
    – bmike Mod
    Sep 29, 2015 at 19:39
  • After your answer & link, I shall now be as critical as if they were new posts. Very many of them so far have been reasonable to good answers, some with a decent number of upvotes.
    – Tetsujin
    Sep 29, 2015 at 19:41
  • @bmike see the comments in the meta question - the programmer did not understand how things work and the queue is not just last months
    – mmmmmm
    Sep 30, 2015 at 21:41

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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This appears to be intentional. As of 1700 UTC October 8, the backlog queue has been reviewed. The site-wide change is being discussed in this answer/question:

I'd like to try raising the reputation for getting enqueued to the Late Answer reviews to 50 and reconsider upping it to 100 at some point in the future

If there's a big problem with this change, asking on MSE directly or here would be ideal.

Personally, I'm seeing a majority of answers that deserve up votes. A few answers that are spam/terrible, but the real benefit I'm seeing is giving attention to the questions themselves. Most of the bad answers are due to a bad question, so I'm cleaning them up when I find a bad late answer as well.

When the OP doesn't accept an answer, it encourages late answers, so I'll encourage everyone that reviews to take their time on this large queue and really give each post some attention before moving to the next review.

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  • 2
    In doing this, some other answers on each question are getting the punishment/reward they deserve too ;) The entire process may move some rep, overall
    – Tetsujin
    Sep 29, 2015 at 19:53
  • @Tetsujin Indeed - one or two up votes on an answer makes a lot of difference to users with less than 50 total rep. I see lots of encouragement to be offered in addition to delete/comment/down vote.
    – bmike Mod
    Sep 29, 2015 at 20:01
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    for sure. It's rare that such a disparate collection of older Q/As gets a real review. My initial foray into this was to try to determine why they'd been queued. After your answer to my rather stunned initial question, my review process has taken on a whole new vein - though I may have 'wasted' some of my early attempts, in the confusion.
    – Tetsujin
    Sep 29, 2015 at 20:06
  • This is not a month's worth so,e are years old
    – mmmmmm
    Sep 30, 2015 at 21:26
  • @mark it is a months worth according to the person that wrote the code and made the change. We are seeing the oldest 1.2 k of the tasks that now need to be reviewed. The code doesn't dump more items into one queue due to reviewer fatigue.
    – bmike Mod
    Sep 30, 2015 at 21:36
  • "Intentional" means, yes, this is a well-known, but temporary issue. The change took effect going back to the start of the site, but once all the current reviews are completed, the effect of the change should be only a few extra answers on the queue every now and then. It should not be a continual flood of tasks like you see here. Sorry about the alarm.
    – Robert Cartaino
    Oct 5, 2015 at 21:12
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    @RobertCartaino as astonishing as the queue was, I see this "dump" as a wholly positive thing for the site. Practice makes a better practitioner, so I'm seeing far higher quality reviews from people that now have a few hundred tasks under their belt. Plus lots of voting up of good answers.
    – bmike Mod
    Oct 5, 2015 at 21:39
  • @bmike Awesome. That is great to hear!
    – Robert Cartaino
    Oct 5, 2015 at 23:08

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