I have been reviewing questions here for the last 6-8 months fairly consistently, and it used to be that the queues I have access to were always pretty small. Usually, I would see 0-5 items in each of First Posts, Late Answers, Suggested Edits, and Low Quality Posts.

However, in the last week or two, the numbers I have seen have skyrocketed. I regularly get the orange number in the top bar which signifies that more than 5 posts are waiting for Suggested Edits, and I often see >10 in the queues. Additionally, it used to be that when I chose one of the queues and finished what was in it, the review page would show that all of the other queues were now empty as other people had taken care of them. Recently, I have often seen that this was not the case - that the queues always seem to be full.

(As of this writing, there are over 60 questions in the VLQ queue, but I'm guessing that's because people got impatient because of this problem.)

Is it just me, or are there really so many more items in the queues than there used to be? Or did there just used to be a bunch of super-dedicated people keeping the numbers low who have all just quit?

There has been a change where flagged posts go into the VLQ ... there is a post on mse...I believe it is this one –  rene Apr 20 at 17:31
@rene Thanks, but that only explains the VLQ. The numbers in the others seem to be higher also. –  Moshe Katz Apr 20 at 17:32
Being a regular in the Close Vote Queue handling I'm used to some higher numbers.. :-) –  rene Apr 20 at 17:33

2 Answers 2

There had been some changes in the way this are handled recently, so that slightly changed the about of items in the review queues:

To start, the Reopen Votes queue had some changes last year. This means that the amount of items in here is risen from 0 to 10.

There has also been a major burndown on the Close Votes queue: Let's burn down the close queue! This means the amount of items is way lower than some months ago (from 120K to 10-20K). Indirectly, this had also slightly affected the Reopen Votes queue [1].

The Very Low Quality queue now also gets lots of reported flags: Let's get rid of the 10K flag queue This, obviously, means this queue is getting bigger (and the votes queue getting smaller).

Apart from that, the First Answer, Suggested Edit and Late Answer queues seem to be the same as normal.

[1]: Personal observation

I like your optimism about the CVQ: it just didn't reach 120K :-) the queue is still fuzzied as can be read from the post you linked. –  rene Apr 20 at 18:09
@rene fixed :) I personally do not pay much attention to that queue, last count I remembered was 50K... –  Wouter J Apr 20 at 18:22
That is too bad, why don't you join us once a week in the SO Close vote reviewers room for the chat event where we put a dent in the Close Vote Queue? –  rene Apr 20 at 20:17

In addition to what Wouter J said, The /review page and the VLQ are very slow. It generally takes about 15 seconds to load a VLQ review, but occasionally goes up to ~30 seconds. I think this discourages some of the reviewers, so reviews taking longer to complete.

I think this discourages some of the robore... cough reviewers –  Braiam Apr 22 at 6:09

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