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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:

    Inbox Zero indicator

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.

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4 Answers 4

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This will mean you'll be notified of outstanding tasks you can't clear.

This is going too far. You know when you go to some site that you don't even have an account on and it's got a fake bar at the top with a "notification" lit up to make you click on it, and it doesn't really go away or do anything?

I know you don't mean it to be, but this is like that. Over time, it will simply teach people that those notifications are frippery and should be ignored.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Giving us an indicator for any reviews is appropriate on a site that often has small review queues, but I agree getting us to act on them means reliably only showing me an indicator when there's something I can actually do about it. I used to ignore the old review indicator sometimes because it was hovering there saying (3), but I'd already done my reviews. At some point there would be whole new reviews in the queue available to me while others had left, but since it always just said (3) I didn't know until I ventured to check on it again. \$\endgroup\$ Dec 14, 2017 at 13:38
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    \$\begingroup\$ But, as doppelgreener points out, this has always been something the review queue does, so this doesn't really seem like feedback on the changes, unless I'm missing something in my run-on-sentence frenzy. \$\endgroup\$
    – Miniman
    Dec 14, 2017 at 14:38
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    \$\begingroup\$ Yes, this is the very problem I'm worried about with this change. As @doppelgreener points out, it's been a problem to some degree for as long as there's been an indicator. We're fixing the biggest source of false positives (not having enough reputation to review something), but that might not be enough. This is why we experiment. ;-) \$\endgroup\$ Dec 14, 2017 at 15:59
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    \$\begingroup\$ @JonEricson Okay :) \$\endgroup\$
    – mattdm
    Dec 14, 2017 at 16:00
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I'm appreciative of the change: if I see no indicator, I now know there's no reviews.

It used to be there could be 1-2 sitting there and I'd just have nothing telling me.

It's a bit over-tuned in that it shows me everything I can't even work on, as mentioned in the question, but over-tuned is a nice departure from under-tuned, and I appreciate there's further work to tune it just the right way.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Wait, there's stuff you can't work on D: You're a mod! And you have 20+K rep! That's crazy... I thought there weren't even queues I don't have access to, and I've just the measly 20K rep. \$\endgroup\$ Dec 14, 2017 at 21:03
  • \$\begingroup\$ I've got all the same queues as you, just the super-vote. (That means I wind up skipping reviews sometimes though since I won't be expert enough to judge voting one way or the other, but that's what everyone else is for -- so there is still stuff I can't work on I guess!) \$\endgroup\$ Dec 14, 2017 at 21:18
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I will note that I was definitely looking at the new (new top-bar, before this experiment) review indicator much less than I had looked at the old (numerical) one. Probably because of all the times there were (3) that I couldn't act on...

In previous weeks I'd been making a conscious effort to click in to the review queue, so I'm glad to see it being experimented with, at least.

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This is actually much less prone to false-positives, so far as I can tell, than the old (numerical) one, which was false-positive all the time. I prefer false-positives to false-negatives for this, anyway, but so far in this experiment I haven’t had any.

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