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I just stumbled over a situation that irritates me. After I used up my 40 votes for a day (I must admit, after voting 31 times I just wanted to earn that Vox Populi badge and actively looked for further questions and answers that I deemed worth voting upon), I could not access the review queues anymore.

Is this done on purpose because voting is one of the actions that could be done for reviewing? But there are many more actions possible (in particular commenting -- or skipping if voting would be the right thing to do). So I wonder what the reason for disabling the review queues is when there are no votes left for the day. I don't think it is a big issue, but I'm just irritated and curious.

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  • Normally the reviews are blocked until the next day if you have done 20 edits or 20 close votes etc. But I've not heard of a direct connection between the normal votes and the review quotes. Please note that the 40 votes a day are real up/downvotes and not votes for close/reopen/delete (which is nevertheless not the case -- you're not in the reputation region yet to cast those special votes -- not yet ;-))
    – user31729
    Commented Dec 5, 2015 at 15:40
  • True, it is about the First Posts and Late Answers queues. And the relation is clearly to the normal up- and down-votes (this was also displayed when I looked at the review queues). Commented Dec 5, 2015 at 15:57

1 Answer 1

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This is as certain review-related actions are considered rate-limiting.


The following was taken verbatim from Why am I unable to continue reviewing first posts after reaching the vote limit?:

Yes, it's definitely by-design.

The following tools are available to you when reviewing first posts from the review queue:

  1. Voting up/down
  2. Editing
  3. Voting to close (on questions) or delete (on negatively-scored answers)
  4. Flagging
  5. Commenting

All of these except for editing are rate-limited in some way. And of the five, voting and editing are the two most important - not only are they critical to the overall quality of the site, but specifically in the case of new users they are our primary means of welcoming new users and demonstrating our commitment to high-quality questions and answers.

So if you can't vote, you're left with editing as your primary tool in this queue. While I'd love think this was enough, in practice folks vote a lot more than they edit - even on Stack Overflow, there are only 2 people consistently averaging more than 30 edits a day. Editing takes more time and effort than any other action on that list, hence the lack of external rate-limiting. If you're diligently editing all or most of the posts you review, more power to you - and if you're done for the day in the First Posts queue, you might find your skills put to good use by either the Low Quality or Suggested Edits queues.

I find editing/close votes/comments to be a better tool personally

Close votes are also rate-limited, can only be used on questions, and even then only used on a minority of questions. If you have close votes to burn, there's a whole queue waiting for you... Comments are nice, but also the most toothless of the bunch - and they also suffer from the same problem as editing: leaving good comments takes more time than anything else. If those were the only tools available to you, it would be a pretty useless queue.

Voting is the easiest, fastest, and IMHO most useful thing you can do in the First Posts queue - if you do nothing else, please vote. And if you burn through all of your votes reviewing first posts, consider that the sign of a job well done. Thank you!

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    While I don't entirely agree that voting is the most useful thing, I understand the design decision. Commented Dec 5, 2015 at 21:24
  • 1
    @cryingshadow: True. It's unfortunate. However, I assume this happens infrequently enough to be considered a flaw in the design.
    – Werner Mod
    Commented Dec 5, 2015 at 21:26

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