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I try to volunteer some of my time to help out SuperUser SE and our community, but the review audits that wouldn't pass an audit themselves are still in the system.

For example, I just stumbled into this bad audit: https://superuser.com/review/low-quality-posts/583646

The answer is, of course, a good answer. It just happens to be a copy of another answer.

I guess for every review, the reviewer is supposed to open another window to read every answer already posted for that question. If that's the expectation, the StackExchange UI needs to be improved to show every other answer during the review process.

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    The audit isn't testing whether people are investigating that far. The system just picks random deleted questions for audits. The assumption is that if people found whatever the problem is the first time around, people can find it again. Another assumption is that the price of a totally automated system is some percentage of audit questions will be bad. So failures have to exceed a threshold before the system calls a time out. The purpose is to keep reviewers alert, and the frustration of failing occasional bad questions makes reviewers more alert. This got your adrenalin up, didn't it?
    – fixer1234
    Commented Oct 16, 2016 at 6:46
  • @fixer1234 Another assumption is that the price of a totally automated system is some percentage of audit questions will be bad. That's a good point. I didn't know it was totally automated. Regarding adrenaline... no.
    – Amazon Dies In Darkness
    Commented Oct 16, 2016 at 23:45

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There is no real way that the answer you were reviewing "Looks OK". It has several red flags that, at the very least, warrant some kind of investigation or action.

Firstly the formatting is awful and could do with, as a minimum, using proper numbered lists and probably bullet points. Attempting to edit would have passed the review as you were doing what the low quality queue wants by attempting to improve bad answers.

Secondly it ends with a simple "Please go to $RANDOM_SITE$" with no direct link to any useful resource on that site. This is often an indicator of blog spam and is a Bad Thing that needs investigation either by yourself or a mod. If you'd investigated that then you would have seen the answer had been deleted on their profile, or a flag would have seen it done by a mod.

Either of these minor inconveniences would have seen you pass the review.

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  • The link at the end is the big deal. Spammers semi-frequently try to evade detection by plagiarizing real content from elsewhere and then tacking on their link.
    – Ben N
    Commented Oct 16, 2016 at 21:57
  • Just a quick FYI: I generally don't make trivial edits like simple formatting, as this is regularly discouraged and criticized throughout StackExchange. Also, the link goes straight to a page defining data structures, as the answer promised. It might be spam, but I did not click around on the page or perform a full evaluation. It's not a great answer, but as reviewers we are instructed to only flag extremely low quality answers, which this is not. Regardless, you can delete this QA, because I have too many commitments to spend more time on it right now.
    – Amazon Dies In Darkness
    Commented Oct 16, 2016 at 23:44
  • "you can delete this QA, because I have too many commitments to spend more time on it right now." - Questions should not be deleted, once they recieve a postively scored answer, simply because the author does not have the time
    – Ramhound
    Commented Oct 19, 2016 at 16:27

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