Have my review permissions been revoked?

Question

As of today I have noticed that I can't go into the review section. It is stating that I can go there on 9th December at the earliest. Is this because my privileges have been revoked for some reason or is this a bug or is the review section being worked on?

Answer 1

Yes, your review privileges have been temporarily revoked.

This is not a bug. Review bans are one of the tools available to moderators to combat robo-reviewing, when a particular user has a track record of bad reviews or it appears that they're not taking enough care over reviewing.

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In your case, you were blocked from reviewing after moderators noticed a significant number of "No Action Needed" reviews on First Posts which definitely needed action, e.g. spam, non-answers, low-quality answers, etc. We also noticed "Looks OK" reviews on Low Quality Posts which should clearly have been deleted - example.¹

You can view your own reviewing history for each queue (e.g. here for First Posts). I would like to encourage you to do this: go over your past reviews, see where you've gone wrong, and work out what you can learn for the future. Good reviewers are always welcome, but bad reviewers are worse than no reviewers at all. Come December, when you're able to review again, please take more care when doing so, even if it means you need to spend a lot longer reviewing each item.

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A few general words of advice for reviewing.

• In the First Posts and Late Answers queues, "No Action Needed" should be the exception rather than the rule. Feedback is important for new users, either to help them improve and learn more about the site if their post is bad, or to encourage them to stick around if it's good. Even if a First Post isn't a non-answer (flag), a great post (upvote), or poorly written (edit), it could still almost always benefit from feedback via comment.

• It's particularly important to review carefully in the First Posts and Late Answers queues, because a single user's review is enough to remove the post from the queue. If you click "No Action Needed" on spam, then someone else will have to flag that spam, and they'll only find the post by chance rather than through the review queue. In other queues, it takes at least two or three robo-reviewers to screw up a whole review item.

• Don't forget that you can always click "Skip" if you aren't sure. Nobody knows everything: if you don't know a particular SF/F work well enough to tell whether a post about it is good or bad, off-topic or on-topic, then you don't have to review it - instead, leave it for someone who does know the subject and will be better equipped to make that call.

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¹ _{Unfortunately these links are only available to 10k+ reputation users since the posts have been deleted, but the very fact that they've been deleted indicates that your "No Action Needed" / "Looks OK" reviews were wrong.}