Some new weird review ban

Question

A few minutes ago I was reviewing low quality posts.

A question appeared containing some link looking like a spam. I hovered over the link, but it didn't show the URL.

I pressed "Edit" to see the link and immediately got a message that I am banned for doing too many wrong reviews.

That's funny.

P.S. This is the review. It clearly states that my action was "Edit". It is a bad post. So the audit is blatantly wrong. How does one know it is spam?

P.P.S. I looked at the review stats (now I can do it thanks to @ByteCommander) and see that I am #2 in Close Votes all time and #4 in Low Quality.

When a user with this stats is banned, that obviously mean that something goes wrong. The system is not perfect, but the main task of moderators is to fix this type of issues.

It's a shame that a moderator instead of reviewing the audits and lifting the ban starts to write an answer, explaining why that happened with some wrong statements, and only after some hype and suggestions from other users payed attention and finally started looking for the button.

Answer 1

According to https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/158678/280883

Here are the full details on how the ban works. Most of the steps take into account the length of any previous review bans you've faced, including manual bans imposed by a moderator:

• If you fail three audits within a (rolling) 30-day period, you will be banned for 2 days if you have no history of getting banned, or for half the length of your previous ban if you do.

• Once a review ban ends, you'll be placed on "review probation" for a period of 30 days. If you fail a single audit while on review probation, you'll be banned for double the length of your previous ban. Review probation is also imposed at the end of a manual moderator's ban

There is no indication that the total number of reviews or passed audits is taken into account for the thresholds to block someone, only the failure count, as I see it.

The system says that you seem to have actually failed even more than 3 audits within those last 30 days.

While I am not sure why you weren't already blocked earlier with these numbers, or whether the post I linked is not up to date, your current block is going to last three days and will be automatically revoked again then.

Regarding how edits should be treated in audits, that is a network-wide implementation and nothing we can directly influence here. Complaints or suggestions about this would need to be posted on Meta Stack Exchange instead. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/368118/4464570 clarifies the behaviour (unless that behavior got changed again by now):

if you try to edit spam, you fail; if you try to edit anything else, you pass.

As a tip for the future: Instead of using the built-in "Edit" button of the review queue UI, open the small "link" on the right side of a post in a new tab to visit the original post on the main site. This will allow you to interact with it normally without accidentally triggering any review action. Keep in mind you still need to go back to the review to complete it.

Answer 2

Review audits are frequently intentionally tricky and weird. It's a common practice on the Stack Exchange network designed to teach the reviewer to stop, look and listen. It's not unusual at Stack Overflow to find audit questions in the close vote review that have an accepted self-answer posted by the author of the question. My first instinct would be to automatically vote to leave all such questions open in order to not close a question that has accepted answer, but the only way to pass the review audit is sometimes to close vote the question anyway because its accepted answer is not good enough. For example, the accepted answer is just a code snippet with no explanation. Even though it doesn't seem fair to close a question just because someone posted a bad answer to it, in this case it is fair because the question was self-answered with a bad answer that no one can benefit from and the accepted self-answer locked out anyone who posted a better answer from getting an accept vote for it.

There are endless variations of honeypot review audits. The only sure way to not fail review audits is to stop, look and listen.