Surely robo-reviewers basically hammer the review pages waiting for a review to appear.
Can the number of daily page refreshes of the review pages be limited to some reasonable "humanly possible" amount - say a several hundred?
Doing so would mean that their bots would exhaust the limit quickly and go away, reducing server load and giving some satisfaction to SO coders.
The daily refresh limit could be expanded and contracted dynamically based on the size of the backlog.
When the refresh limit is reached, it could display the message "Get a life", in case a real human actually hits the limit.
There seems to be some confusion here, even though I thought it was a pretty simple idea. So looks like we add more detail for the pedants who focus on the edge cases:
- A page refresh limit would be completely unrelated to a review limit
- The premise is that bots trash infrequent review queue pages until they get an item to review
- 10K page refreshes was an arbitrarily "large" number that would almost certainly require a bot, as this is roughly one refresh every 9 seconds continuously for 24 hours - hence the "Get a life" message, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe non no-lifers have this kind of time of their hands. Let's say they get a solid 8 hours sleep and spend 2 hours on food and hygiene. If they bash away at the review pages at the rate of 1 every 5 seconds for the remaining hours of the day, they'll hit 10K. Sounds reasonable...