62
Regardless of the practical consequences (or lack thereof) of your actions, there's one part of your complaint that I agree with:
I find this a bit offensive, to be honest.
It is! It's an unnecessarily sanctimonious phrasing in a message from a system that is known to have false positives on a semi-regular basis. The context in which this message is ...
32
Side complaint: I seem to be getting an awful lot of review audits, maybe one per five legitimate review requests.
If you are asking me to spend my time performing community service, I would prefer you not waste my time with pointless "fake" tasks.
30
The newest and one of the most ridiculous examples to date:
https://math.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts/109542
I failed this by clicking "add comment". That's right. You're not allowed to comment when you're being audited. I'm filing a bug report.
25
I have failed a few. One interesting thing is that, for "close" audits at least, the system lies about the vote count, showing 0 instead of the actual vote count. Which seems to be counterproductive: it appears they change the vote count to encourage reviewers to evaluate the question independently, but then they criticize the reviewer being too independent ...
23
Flag, flag, flag, flag, and flag.
If you see something wrong, tell the mods.
If you see your flag declined, you will know that you may be a bit too sensitive.
If you see your flag marked as helpful, you will know that you've done a good thing.
For what it is worth moderators can temporarily ban users from review queues. We have used it a few times ...
21
The only consequences of failed audits can be a temporary and short-lived review ban if this happens multiple times within a short duration. Even if this does happen, you can still vote to close questions you find elsewhere.
As you have just noticed, the system isn't perfect hence why the penalty is so small. It's just to prevent people from mindlessly ...
20
https://math.stackexchange.com/a/508096/17596 showed up as a "first post" review. I found the animation far more distracting than helpful, so I downvoted (disagreeing, apparently, with fifteen folks who think it's the cat's meow). Review audit failed.
20
If you are of the opinion that a vote to close or a review or another action on one of your posts was inappropriate you can signal this to the moderators via a flag, chose "in need of moderator intervention" and explain the issue.
Moderators then can review the situation and, if appropriate, take some action. The action could be, e.g.: talk to the user (...
19
I think this would be a very good feature. It happens to me too often that rejecting an edit is already too late - it was approved by other users. Even though there were much more obvious issues to address than removing a tag or adding two dollar signs.
An example from a couple of hours ago: an edit changed "Leibnitz" to "Liebnitz" and was quickly approved....
18
I failed a review audit for this question because I went to close it as duplicate as I recognised the title and content of the post so thought it was an exact duplicate of itself (the review had artificially made it appear that the question was written 2 hours ago). This highlights a flaw in the system in my opinion.
18
Note: Improve apparently means that you agree with the edit but think it could've been done better.
I've found that the "safest" way of handling review queues is that, whenever you are not exactly sure what is going on, click on the question to view/comment on it in its original form (and not through the review queue). I've been bitten already several ...
16
It happens; the audit system has false positives, partly due to the fact that there is no uniform standard according to which questions get upvoted or closed. So, if your opinion happens to diverge from the majority opinion (precisely, the majority of those who voted on the particular question), you get yelled at. Which isn't pleasant of course, not to ...
16
Bad robo audits can be frustrating, but they don't really do much, apart from make you wish the robo auditor had a neck you could squeeze. The criteria for how it chooses the "right" choice is explained here and is clearly prone to occasional errors. (If it weren't, why would we need reviewers?) It is possible to get an automatic review ban for failing ...
16
Just to get this question off the unasnwered list, here's the explanation (thanks to YuiTo Cheng, Xander Henderson, jgon and other commenters for the help). It turns out that the poster of the answers had been posting a large number of word-for-word identical answers on similar reference-request questions. The link contains a referral, making it seem quite ...
15
I'd say the culprit is that last sentence:
This much anticipated second edition of the most successful calculus text published in the last two decades retains the best of the first edition while introducing important advances and refinements.
That just reeks of advertisement. It says absolutely nothing of content about the book itself, and sounds like it ...
14
This question seems half-way based on a false premise (although this is quite understandable). Let me try to explain what is happening. I assume we are talking about this review
There are two unrelated things happening that make this confusing.
Some items in the review-queues are audits and just there to test if you are reviewing carefully/correctly. ...
14
What happens if you fail the review audit several times in a row? Do you get suspended from reviewing?
When one fails enough review audits, the system issues an automatic review ban (of length between two and thirty days). I don't know what number or proportion "enough" is, but it's not the crucial point whether these failures are in consecutive audits or ...
13
No, you did right. That's not an answer in any way, and voting to delete it is the correct action.
The poor audit system was misled by the post having a score of +5. Since it doesn't know any mathematics, the only criterion it has to pick posts for audits is the vote tally. Sometimes that leads to wrong-headed audits. But that's at least as much an issue ...
12
The first time I got an audit, I thought it was a good idea. Well, not anymore.
I've failed some when we changed the policy, initiated by - I believe - this topic. Since the new "close" reason was included, I go for it almost on every question that was nominated for closing and lacks any context or effort (i.e., copy/paste questions). I myself nominate such ...
11
You are not alone in getting a bit irritate by these tests, and the wording chosen by SE is typically to the more playful side, which does not go over well with everybody.
However, there is some point in having such tests, as it offers at least something of defense against users blindly and irresponsibly clicking through.
I prefer the occasional test, ...
10
I have seen one such test edit. It was so obvious to reject it. May be they can one day train their SW to send less and less obviously bad edits? May be the software can eventually do good edits? When that happens!
10
The auditor is a robot who does not follow the nuances of meta.MSE debates, and, I'm afraid, does not even read the FAQ. It uses machine-readable metadata associated with posts (edit/closure/deletion history, votes, etc), hides it from the user being audited, and checks whether the user's reaction aligns with the actual fate of the post.
The particular ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible