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The edit queue is up for discussion again.

I have a different feature request: Tell new editors when their edit suggestions are rejected.

When I first started editing on Stack Overflow, I was delighted that there was finally a way I could contribute to Stack Overflow and earn some points towards upvote or comment privileges. It seemed -- to my naive perspective -- that it even allowed for a workaround to the fact that commenting was blocked.

So I started editing. After a few weeks and several edits, I noticed (in a minor tab of my profile page) that the majority of my edits had been rejected. So I changed my editing habits. Suggesting edits takes time, and as a new user, I want ALL of my edits to be accepted. Score or otherwise, I don't want to develop a low accepted-edit score.

If I had received a notification of my rejected edit (similar to the top-right notifications of messages and reputation score changes), I would have begun to incorporate community feedback immediately and saved reviewers the trouble of reviewing my earlier edits.

This may be a moderately-expensive feature to implement, but I think it will be worth it. Newer reviewers will be happier because they will not have the unpleasant surprise of seeing several edits rejected at once. And edit-queue reviewers will be happier because they have 5x or 10x fewer bad edits per new user.

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    it could also have the opposite effect of users becoming upset at being notified their work is being rejected, even in cases where it's just a one-off that won't matter in the grand scheme of things. Transparency is generally good, but it can also result in a bunch of nitpicking in cases where it just isn't worth the scrutiny.
    – Kevin B
    Commented Sep 22, 2022 at 16:34
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    It's not uncommon that we have to mod-message people to get them stop suggesting a particular class of bad edits. This seems like a decent idea, even if it means a bit more handling of griping. Perhaps we'll eventually need to hide the reviewer names from people viewing their own suggested edit rejections, similar to how we do for question closure, but we can also cross that bridge when we come to it.
    – Ryan M Mod
    Commented Sep 22, 2022 at 16:36
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    @KevinB Maybe the system could warn users when there are several recent rejections, kind of like we do with flags. So the user isn't getting pinged for one offs but does get warned when there's a pattern.
    – BSMP
    Commented Sep 22, 2022 at 16:56
  • I vaguely remember some sort of warning message being displayed to users when they try to suggest an edit after having several suggestions rejected. Does/did this exist or is it just my imagination?
    – 41686d6564
    Commented Sep 22, 2022 at 20:36
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    meta.stackexchange.com/questions/401060/… seems to allege that this is now status-completed. Or do I overstretch the meaning of the bulleted list there?
    – tripleee
    Commented Jul 1 at 17:27
  • @tripleee Cool! I no longer have my edits face that queue, so I cannot confirm or deny it from my own experience.
    – Josiah Yoder
    Commented Jul 1 at 18:29
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    This question is similar to: Add an inbox notification for rejected edits. If you believe it’s different, please edit the question, make it clear how it’s different and/or how the answers on that question are not helpful for your problem.
    – C8H10N4O2
    Commented Jul 3 at 15:04
  • @C8H10N4O2 This duplication mark comes too late. The company apparently already has implemented this based on my (apparently duplicate) suggestion. Furthermore, I think the way I asked the question was more useful as I simply asked to "tell" users and not for an "inbox" which suggests a specific and perhaps non-ideal UI.
    – Josiah Yoder
    Commented Jul 3 at 16:46

1 Answer 1

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This issue has already been solved in a different way than what was proposed in the post. Users are notified via a banner on the suggested edit page (a view of the edit page for users who don't have enough rep to make direct edits, shown at the end of this answer) when they’ve had an edit rejected. We believe this is a better user experience than inbox notifications because the potential for discouraging users from suggesting edits in the future is lower.

Receiving an inbox notification saying you did something wrong at any given time (likely not while editing) would have a more negative impact on most users than reading a notice while they are actively in the flow of editing. Kevin B's comment also explains this well.

A screenshot of the editing interface for a new edit with the following text in a banner above the revision selector: Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed. Attention! Your last edit was rejected. While reasonable edits may be rejected for many reasons outside of your control, you should review the reasons given for rejecting it before continuing.

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    My worry is that this looks really similar to what this banner looks like by default, with the change only being to the content of the second paragraph. This could pretty easily be overlooked (similar to the general phenomenon of banner blindness).
    – Ryan M Mod
    Commented Jul 5 at 1:18
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    Oh...!, so that means we only get that feedback the next time we want to do an Edit, which could be weeks or months later...! And trying to access manually this "suggested edit page" by starting a fake Edit usually requires several hours of trying to bypass the "There are too many pending edits on Stack Overflow. Please try again later." stage... This is not the best workflow, I'm afraid...
    – chivracq
    Commented Jul 5 at 16:08
  • Why is the right panel yellow? Isn't that informational?
    – Braiam
    Commented Jul 5 at 17:24
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    @Braiam Yellow notices should be used for warning notices. Informational notices should be using the blue style as indicated in our Stacks design system documentation. Unfortunately, some notices pre-date the design system and have not been updated yet. We try to at least make sure the areas we're working on have the appropriate style. Updating every other notice on this page was out of scope for this ticket.
    – Carrott StaffMod
    Commented Jul 8 at 14:42
  • @RyanM That's fair, let me look into making that section or notice more prominent and obvious when this warning appears. As mentioned here, some of the notices on that page should probably be blue instead of yellow, fixing some of those may help with this issue as well.
    – Carrott StaffMod
    Commented Jul 8 at 14:45

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