Why can't I review posts anymore?

Question

I went to review queue and I was confronted with a message:

Obviously it says I have been selecting No Action Needed, which I have, b/c on all the questions or answers it only provides No Action Needed or Skip. I didn't want to skip the post as I was there to make a review, so I just selected No Action Needed. Maybe if you were given more of a choice ,b/c right now this is really counter intuitive. I thought No Action Needed , means no action is needed by me as someone has taken care of the issue, which is why other choices are now not there when they normally are.

What is the point of the Skip button? The more I think about it, the more ridiculous I think this is, why even bother have someone check a question if all you can do is skip it???

Answer 1

In that dialog, you are expected to do something to the post you're reviewing. You have all the same options you do when looking at a post outside review, and once you do, the review is considered "finished". From the Review help page:

In these queues, you can edit the post, flag it, upvote or downvote it, add a comment, or upvote a previously existing comment. When you take one of these actions, the "I'm Done" button becomes enabled, allowing you to complete the review.

"No Action Needed" means that there is literally nothing you can do about the post to indicate it's quality -- it's not worthy of an upvote, but there's nothing wrong with it to justify a downvote or flag, and it can't be improved by an edit. That's a pretty rare case, so if you do it too often (in particular, if you "pass over" things that other reviewers have issues with), it will stick out as odd, and eventually you may draw a temporary review ban.

If someone else has already been there and "fixed" the post, consider upvoting it. If someone else has already left a comment pointing out something that could be improved, you can upvote that comment to indicate agreement. "No Action Needed" is really a last resort.

The "Skip" button exists for cases where you don't feel like you can accurately judge a post's quality. This happens more on larger sites where judging quality can depend heavily on, e.g. how much you know about a given programming language (e.g. "is this even realistic code" type of things); on SF/F, that does still happen but it's less common. The Skip button basically means "I don't want to do this review at all", and you don't get credit for it in your review stats.

Answer 2

Why can't I review posts anymore?

Because your review privileges have been temporarily revoked, due to a series of bad reviews.

56 of your 57 First Posts reviews have been "No Action Needed", which is a warning sign in itself since some kind of action is usually appropriate. (You can review your reviews here - note that this link works only for you and mods.) And upon looking more closely, some of your reviews were "No Action Needed" on non-answers, where the appropriate course of action would be flagging.

Some of your Close Votes reviews have also been inappropriate: you voted to leave open a couple of story-ID questions contrary to our established policy. I assume this is simply because you weren't aware of the policy, and no harm was done in these cases, but now you know.

on all the questions or answers it only providesNo Action Needed or Skip. I didn't want to skip the post as I was there to make a review, so I just selected No Action Needed.

This remark displays a very worryingly poor understanding of the way the review system works. If the only actual review you could make was "No Action Needed", then what would be the point of having the review queue at all? You should have realised that you were misunderstanding the system if you thought there was only one possibility for actually reviewing the post. What you should be doing when reviewing First Posts or Late Answers is taking some action on the post (e.g. voting, flagging, editing, commenting) and only clicking "No Action Needed" if, well, no action is needed. Once you've taken some action, even if it be as simple as upvoting a comment, the "No Action Needed" button will disappear and an "I'm Done" button will appear instead.

but it has already been flagged to get to this point, so why flag it again?

No. In the First Posts review queue, every post by a completely new user shows up for review. The point is that new users are never supposed to be posting into a vacuum, and always get some kind of feedback on their post, which makes them more likely to stick around if the post is good. Same for Late Answers - every new answer to an old question shows up there.

You may be getting mixed up with the Low Quality Posts review queue, in which answers do indeed have to be flagged in order to appear. But in that queue there's no "No Action Needed" option; you can either click "Looks OK" or "Recommend Deletion".

Another important point about First Posts and Late Answers is that you're the only person to review them - a single review is enough to remove them from the queue. That's why it's particularly important that you review these carefully - an inappropriate "No Action Needed" could result in non-answers or spam remaining on the site unnoticed.

Please read this guidance on reviewing First Posts and Late Answers.