Over the last couple weeks, I've noticed a single user (a moderator) closing an inordinate amount of questions through the CV Queue every couple of days or so. This is quite obvious because not only are normal users limited to the number of close votes they have per day (50), they are even more limited in the number of close vote reviews they can perform in a day (40).
Now, moderators don't have this limit, because as part of their volunteer role as an exception handler they may need to close more than 40 questions in a single 24-hour period. I think as a mere byproduct of how the system is designed (I could be wrong), this means they aren't limited to 40 reviews per day, either.
While it was a little troubling to see prior days where 1000 or so reviews were done in a single 24 hour period (for multiple days in a row), I am now more concerned than usual about seeing 1500 reviews in a single day (NB - it's true that I've personally petitioned for higher thresholds, but the number I always put forward was merely 80 to 100, never anything as extreme as a thousand or more).
There are historical examples of users unilaterally doing an action en masse that was viewed as problematic, to the point where either the Meta community creates a formal procedure or where the system is altered to alert someone...
Just to be clear, I don't have specific examples of problematic reviews here, nor am I necessarily unhappy that questions, in general, might be getting closed at a slightly more frequent rate recently; I simply have the following concerns:
- The sheer amount of reviews makes it more than a little daunting to go through and audit the reviews if the concern ever rises to that level. Combine that with the fact that this is a moderator and folks who are concerned may be more reticent to speak up if they notice an issue.
- Likewise, the likelihood of missing something, or just getting fatigued in general while reviewing nonstop for an entire day[1], and then having their overall performance decline, is heightened.
- This is a user who is unilaterally closing questions as a moderator in many cases, I have to assume. On occasion, that's not an issue, but for 1500 items in a single day, well... that's a lot of action happening without input from other users.
- After so many reviews so many days, the ever-present concern put forth by CMs on why they never raise the threshold (burnout) makes me concerned that the moderator might get burned out and not want to do this (or other) moderation task anymore.
- Moderators are exception-handlers. Reviewing questions for closure is not an exceptional task. I'm not sure if it's appropriate for a moderator to (ab)use their exceptional powers for a task not intended to be performed en masse.
For what it's worth, before these ~1000-review-days started occurring, this user had relatively very few close vote reviews under their belt; I might have been less concerned if this user had already performed thousands of CV reviews before starting to do several hundred a day... I'm not sure.
What does the community think about this? Is 1000/1500 unilateral closures/reviews in a day something that should be discouraged?
[1]: Some break-out numbers of how much reviewing this is at different speeds:
1 review every 15 seconds for 6 hours and 15 minutes, or
1 review every 30 seconds for 12 hours and 30 minutes.
While close vote reviewing can be pretty easy to do reliably at a pretty fast rate in certain situations (e.g. a review every 6-10 seconds), that's only ever been done (and only ever been possible) for 40 reviews at a time... which means you're only reviewing for about 10 to 15 minutes. I think it's much more likely that errors will occur when working at that rate for many hours at a time.
