Request: a per-category review queue posts 121–137

I have no financial interest in anything named in this thread and I want to say so before I comment on per-category review queue, because it is the sort of subject where it matters.

Practical answer on per-category review queue, since the theoretical one is upthread: do the simplest check first, write down the result, and only then decide whether the complicated explanation is needed. It usually is not.

Narrowing post #122, because the general version has more than one answer.

That reframing is better than the original request and staff would consider it. Which is a good illustration of why these belong in public: the first version would have been declined and the third is worth building.

Take the reasoning and check the arithmetic; I do not always get it right.

Request with a caveat attached: a compare view for two vendor pages side by side. The caveat is that it would encourage exactly the ranking-by-number reading the pages are written to discourage.

The honest answer is that it depends, and here is what it depends on.

Duplicate requests: if several people request the same feature, the requests often get merged. Check whether your feature has already been suggested before posting.

That is the version I use. It may not be the version that is correct.

Per-category review queue is a question about a distribution, not about a value, and treating it as a value is what produces the confident wrong answers.

Post #126 answers the question as asked. The question underneath it is different.

Genuine question rather than a rhetorical one: has anyone here actually observed per-category review queue, as opposed to read about it? The thread is long and I cannot tell.

This is the answer, and the reason it is the answer is the more useful part.

Picking up post #126: that is the part I would want checked first.

Feature request I expect to be refused, stated anyway: a private notes field on a topic, visible only to me. I keep those in a text file and the text file loses the link.

Request: an export of my own posts. Not for any dramatic reason — I want to search my own history offline, and site search is optimised for finding other people's material.

If it helps: the failure mode here is usually boring rather than dramatic.

Source for the per-category review queue figure, since it was asked for. It is in the discussion rather than the abstract, which is why the version circulating is stronger than the paper is.

Reading the surrounding paragraph is worth the two minutes. The authors are more careful than their summarisers.

I read post #132 twice before replying, because I had assumed the opposite.

Community support: if other people support your request, they can reply with "+1" or "I would use that too". Widely-requested features are prioritised.

Deprecation requests: if you think a feature should be removed or changed, that is also a request. Explain why you think it would improve the site.