There are enough people who could be reviewing these to drop the queue to nothing very quickly, if they were inclined to do so. It's important to encourage as many reviewers as possible; when a small handful of users are effectively acting as gatekeepers for every question that arrives on the site, it becomes very difficult for the majority of active users to have an influence on what is being asked and answered here - it's better to have 50 people here doing 20 reviews each day, not 20 people doing 50 reviews.
And that's not even getting into how easy it is to become careless when you're reviewing dozens of posts in one sitting.
In fact, it's not altogether a bad thing if the queue never reaches 0. There's a certain urgency that arises when a queue hovers close to empty, and that's not always a good thing! Getting suggested edits or new-user posts reviewed quickly is helpful; these tend to be quite time-sensitive. Closing can be, but while a suggested edit may become worthless in a matter of minutes, many poor questions can still be closed a day or two later with no ill effects. Given it takes 4 days before close votes even start to age away, a question that doesn't need to be closed doesn't really suffer by staying in the queue for that long either.
The big problem here is that some of those pending review tasks are a year old!
See, the queue prioritizes new stuff first - tasks that are newly-created stand a better chance of being shown to reviewers than old tasks do. Tasks that've already been reviewed also get prioritized - so y'all are actually doing a pretty good job of keeping up with tasks that showed up in the past few weeks (pretty much since we added that indicator at the top for 10K users).
So what can you do about those old questions lurking in the back of the queue? Well, a good chunk of them probably don't matter - that's why they're lurking, because no one is looking at them. But some of them could use a bit of attention... And this is where a recently-introduced change to the closing system can help you out: if you have a gold badge in a given tag, filter the close queue down to just duplicate reviews in just that tag, and you'll be able to single-handedly clear out up to 20 every day:
Incidentally, I love filtering by tag - it's the only thing that makes reviewing close votes bearable. So I went and turned on another new feature:
That's m0sa's new filtering UI - you get quick links from /review directly to the top tags and close reasons. I like it a lot, and hope y'all will as well.
There's one other problem: y'all get 20 reviews, and only 24 votes - so if you review 20 posts and all 20 should be closed, that only leaves 4 votes for new questions that you encounter on the site. That paltry surplus leaves some of you in the position of having to ration your votes - not a good way to encourage folks to review (unless you wait until just prior to the new day). So I'm raising the number of close votes per person here to 50 per day. That's enough to review judiciously, close new questions if necessary, and still have plenty of votes in reserve in case something terrible happens.
The number of reviews you can do each day remains at 20 - it'll automatically increase to 40 if a queue ever goes over 1000.
