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When going through the Review queue, I activated a "test review" (and passed, BTW). I thought it could have been improved with a comment, so I type out an explanation, hoping to help the user, click Post, and got a message that comments cannot be left on deleted posts.

So, basically, we can now hack it by trying to leave a comment when we think we're being tested? I know on some of the review queues, leaving a comment on a deleted post will trigger the "Congratulations" message, but on this one, I had to recommend deletion (since it was deleted).

Thoughts?

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    Considering the act of commenting means you read the post , and test reviews are meant to make sure people read the post, wouldn't that mean things work as they should? ;p
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Commented May 22, 2013 at 6:49
  • You can probably just click through to the question and look for the post you're reviewing.
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Commented May 22, 2013 at 7:30
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    I agree with @JourneymanGeek here—if you actually started writing a comment, that means you read the post and decided to take action. That's not a "hack". But the real bug here is that the message about not being able to leave comments shouldn't be shown.
    – slhck Mod
    Commented May 22, 2013 at 8:26
  • Alright, bug it is then
    – Canadian Luke
    Commented May 22, 2013 at 14:52
  • Not exactly 'by design', but this isn't a huge concern - the only people that notice this are (broadly) the ones paying attention in the first place, at which point the intent of the audit has already been satisfied.
    – Tim Post Staff
    Commented May 25, 2013 at 6:55

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Multiple discussions concerning comments on review audits have been raised on MSO, I believe this particular one as well but I can't seem to locate it. Basically, it's not a huge concern.

As slhck pointed out in comments, the fact that you actually read the post means we got the action that we were hoping for out of you. These are designed primarily to catch people that are just going through the motions to get a badge, while helping folks to hone their moderation and review skills.

If this had been a real world scenario where the post was still live on the site and you just happened upon it while looking at a question - you would have taken one of the correct courses of action by commenting or editing in an effort to improve the post. That's all the audit was trying to confirm - though it was programmed to expect you to recommend deletion because that's the workflow that was presented. Your call on this one was equally valid.

Those that this would catch just blindly take the path of least resistance in order to get to the next item and advance their badge progress, and they would have failed this audit. Additionally, someone that didn't feel any action was needed with this post and thought it looked good would have (hopefully) learned something.

Audits aren't perfect, but they don't really need to be in order to be effective. Someone paying attention would quickly be able to figure out the post had been deleted anyway, and those aren't the folks we need to be worrying about.

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