Can a user be notified when his post hits low quality queue?

Question

From time to time I review Low-Quality-Posts which are in fact very high quality from technical point of view, but lack the explanation. These kind of answers usually come from higher reputation users.

There are no good solution for a reviewer - it is a pity to delete good answer, but at the same time a few lines of code (or even one) is completely useless for the asker and later viewers, so in principle those posts should be deleted. The reviewer can edit reviewed post himself if feel up to the task, but that is not always the case and sometimes is a significant effort. A good example comes from a related question on meta: Low quality posts from high rep users. That post was extensively edited by moderator and finally ended up as a community wiki.

Wouldn't it be a good idea to add notification to the user that his/her post is in low quality queue, so that he/she can take a second look and edit the post himself to prevent from being deleted?

I'm not sure whether that's good idea for newcomers (they could be confused), but it would certainly remind high rep users to keep theirs posts on an equally high level.

Answer 1

You make an interesting point, but there are a few things to keep in mind:

If the answer is useful even though it could be improved by an explanation, it shouldn't be deleted—but you should add a comment requesting that it be expanded to explain it better.

If the answer truly isn't clear and is too short to be useful, it should be deleted no matter who wrote it.

In my opinion there are very few cases where a user needs to be specially notified that his post has his the low-quality queue, and all of these can be handled by the reviewer simply adding a comment to the answer, thus notifying the person who posted the answer.

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You should keep in mind a few things:

• The queue is seen by people with a certain rep level, so hopefully people reviewing "low-quality" posts have a little bit of judgement/intelligence.
• As noted in the related question you linked to, high-rep users are capable of writing crap also.
• Sometimes short answers are all that's needed. For instance, this answer is very short but could probably be three times shorter and still contain the needed info. If that showed up in the low-quality queue, it would be up to the reviewer to say, "Yes, this is a good answer even though it's short."

An automated "Your post hit the low-quality queue" wouldn't serve much purpose:

• It would confuse a newcomer who actually did post crap.
• For a newcomer who posted a valid answer that was simply short, it would likely provoke some slight degree of protest. ("But—that wasn't low quality!")
• For a long term user who should already know better but nevertheless posted actual crap—do you think an automated message will make him improve? (I think not, but I think messages from actual people in the community might help.)
• For a high-rep user who posted a valid but short answer, it would just be more noise. "Oh yeah, there's the 'low quality queue' alert because that's a short answer. I guess I'll keep an eye on it; the reviewers should see that it's valid...."

The whole point of having a review queue is to allow human judgement to enter the equation, and to quietly, discreetly handle posts that need handling, without alarming/alienating/confusing/annoying authors of valid posts that somehow trip the automated filters.