Firstly, thank you for taking the time to post this! It's rare to see such a conscientious reviewer, and much appreciated. I hope you'll be more active in the review queues in the future!
There's a fairly small set of possible actions you can take on a First Post or Late Answer: you can
upvote,
downvote, (suggest an)
edit, add a
comment,
flag, (vote to)
close, (vote to)
delete, or
upvote a comment. Or of course just click
No Action Needed or
Skip.
Here's a rough checklist, off the top of my head, of what to consider when reviewing these posts:
- Is the post good? Is it an interesting question, or a useful answer? If so, upvote.
- Is it so bad that it shouldn't stay? Is it spam, abusive, or nonsense? Is it an off-topic question, a duplicate, or otherwise worthy of closure (excessively broad, unclear, or opinion-based)? Is it posted as an answer without attempting to answer the question, or incomprehensible? If so, flag. (I see you have less than 3k rep; higher-rep users might vote to close or delete in this case.)
- Is it bad but not that bad? Is it a useless or poorly researched (but still on-topic) question, or an incorrect or poorly written answer (but still a comprehensible answer)? If so, downvote.
- Can you improve it? Does it have any typos or spelling/grammar mistakes, or is it poorly formatted in some way that you know how to fix? If so, (suggest an) edit.
- Do you have any feedback for the user? Some new users take well to any feedback, either using it to improve their post or just letting it make them feel at home. Even if the post is from a drive-by unregistered user who's unlikely ever to return, a little helpful commentary feedback can still be useful for anyone else reading it in the future. If you have anything useful to say, leave a comment. If someone else has said it already, you might consider upvoting their comment.
If you don't know the answers to some of the above queries (e.g. because the post is about a sci-fi or fantasy work you've never read/seen and know nothing about), then click Skip. This means your review count isn't incremented and the post stays in the queue to be reviewed by someone else, hopefully someone more knowledgeable about the topic.
If there's really nothing to be done on the post - it's neither good enough to be worth upvoting, nor bad enough to be worth downvoting or editing, nor interesting enough to be worth commenting on - you can click No Action Needed. But at this point I'll quote a moderator from another site, in a post from which I personally learned a lot of what I know about reviewing:
The one thing that causes new users to leave most often is a lack of human interaction. Don't let new users ask or answer into the void. No Action Needed is almost always flat-out wrong. You are the only one to review a user's first post; bear this in mind when reviewing.
