A customer pointed out to me that reviewable claiming of flagged posts is applied on a topic level, not on a post level. The intention behind this is made clear by the claim button’s preview text (“claim this topic.”) This seems to mean that once a flagged post has been claimed by a staff member, any subsequent flags for that topic’s posts will be automatically assigned to the staff member who claimed the flag. I can see how this could be useful to allow a single staff member handle multiple flags that are generated with a topic’s discussion gets out of control.
There are a couple of possible issues with this. The first is that it may not be clear to staff members that by claiming a review item they are claiming all subsequent flags that are generated for the topic. It wasn’t immediately obvious to me that this is how the review queue works. If for some reason a moderator claims a flag and then neglects to act on it, the site’s other moderators will not be able to handle subsequent flags unless an admin removes the claim.
As an example, here’s a screenshot of my site’s review queue. I only explicitly claimed the second off-topic item. The first item in the list was automatically assigned to me:
The second issue is that based on my testing, when I take an action on one of the review items in the list, the other review item is automatically unassigned from me:
If reviewable claiming is intended to be applied on a per topic basis and not a per post basis, it doesn’t seem correct that acting on one of the review items would unassign the staff member from the review items that had been automatically assigned to them. I’m not sure if this is a bug, or if it’s the intended behaviour.