Hm. I was never banned before. It is possible that I failed 3 times in a month. Some audits are really weird. But I got a 3-day ban. I think the solution is to stop reviewing. It is crazy when a user has done 20000+ or about review fails 3 stupid audits in a month gets banned. But Edit can not be treated as negative. But I don't care any more. I am done with reviews. I pressed Edit on a post that had been already deleted as spam. It makes no sense at all.

Accidentally came across this post ... I fully do understand you, Dmitry ! Wondering when the time will come that SE generally overthinks the way how they treat valuable veterans. Not sure, but I think I recall a similar situation where Zanna was banned and terdon immediately stepped in and revoked the ban. What about doing the same here, Byte ? @Pilot6 is one of those members who continually improve the (content of the) site drastically throughout years !

"Currently, attempting to edit is seen as "negative" action, like downvoting or close-voting, i.e. something that should be done to bad posts." Why did clicking "edit" fail this audit, then? I'm pretty sure it's this audit, and the post really is spam (and had been rightly deleted as such). In real life we don't edit spam (and Pilot6 had no intention of submitting the edit), but if review audits consider edit attempts as judgments that a post is bad, shouldn't Pilot6 have passed the audit?

@EliahKagan Exactly. I wanted to see what is the URL of that BigBoss. I didn't plan really to edit. I was blocked right agter I pressed the Edit button.

@Pilot6 To correct you, there were already a few review bans recorded back in 2015. Anyway, please don't let this stop you from being a valuable member of the community. Some of the most active reviewers have dozens of bans accumulated over the years actually. I agree with you, and there are many similar complaints on the various Meta sites, that neither the review audit system nor the posts it automatically selects as audits are perfect. It surely could be improved, but that is a job for the SE development team, which we all know is overworked.

Also let me revisit the whole issue and the failed audits in question once again. After a long and both confusing and infuriating search for where in the site's wonderfully intuitive and logically organized UI the button to actually lift review bans might be, I finally just found it.

I do 1000+ reviews a month. Taking in account that the review system is not perfect, 3-4 audit fails is not enough. It is a fraction of a percent. If this can't be reverted by moderators, I will stop reviewing for a month or 2. I don't want to get banned for ONE audit fail again. If SE doesn't need my effort, I won't spend my time on it. As simple as that.

@Pilot6 "If SE doesn't need my effort, I won't spend my time on it. As simple as that." ... once a wise man called terdon said something like : "Don't make announcements - just do it, or don't !" :)

@cl-netbox I'll do it anyway. But maybe the "announcement" will atrract some attention to the problem.

If nobody cares, I am the last one to care.

@ByteCommander How do I know it is spam unless I see the URL? It is crap.

@EliahKagan I am sorry, that was an oversight on my part. I corrected my answer accordingly. Apparently, "if you try to edit spam, you fail; if you try to edit anything else, you pass." - according to a 2018 MSO answer by Shog. Yet whether opening the review dialog to view the markdown, or actually submitting an edit should be counted as failure is another discussion. Once could also argue e.g. that you don't want to waste people's time on editing an already deleted post because they missed a non-obvious spam link.

Now I got an explanation that it is flawed, I can use workarounds, and nothing can be done. Is this correct? The next time I fail I get a 6 days ban, right? @ByteCommander

If the posts I quoted are still up to date and I interpret them correctly, I think that is correct, yes. Other than that, I understand you are upset, yet I don't appreciate the way you are communicating on the issue, including swearing and threatening. I haven't undone a review ban before, and when I searched for it yesterday I was unable to find it, to be honest. I have looked through your recently failed audits again and can understand how those might be ambiguous, or how the "Edit" was a system problem. Therefore I'm going to lift the ban, but please be more mindful too. We are also human.

And even a moderator didn't know that trying to edit a spam post would lead to an audit fail. Isn't that funny? How was I supposed to know that?

Well if it is a problem to lift the ban, don't waste your time. I really don't plan to review for some time. Maybe later things will change.

Nobody knows everything. There are so many details to the SE system and all of its mechanics, which are also changing every now and then, that it's practically impossible to keep track of everything unless you explicitly worked with that part before. Also yeah, a less fragmented documentation would be nice, it's a bit tricky to piece information together from posts scattered across multiple meta sites and questions. Nonetheless, the ban is lifted. That is not an issue, I just didn't know where to search for it before. Now I learned that, and one more detail about audits :)

@ByteCommander " yet I don't appreciate the way you are communicating on the issue". I don't appreciate that it took 8 hours after an answer was was posted for a mod to take a correct action.

"The next time I fail I get a 6 days ban, right?" @Pilot6 the post Byte Commander quoted, which is presumably correct, says that if you get banned again while you are on review probation, your next ban would be twice as long, but if you get banned after that (after another rolling 30 days), your next ban would be half as long.

So I decided to stay away from the queues for 30 days, doesn't it look reasonable?