Orange square for reviews shows only and always 3

Question

This is something I've ignored so far (because I thought that it would get fixed some day), but eventually I'd like to address the issue though.

Whenever there are review items, there's a orange square that appears next to the review label. On ELU, for instance, it works fine for me. Just checked: there was a "1", because there was one suggested edit. I reviewed that one and the square disappeared.

On GL, I've only ever seen a number "3". The square appears when there's an edit, but it does not really disappear after I reviewed it. (By 'not really' I mean that it disappears at some point, but I've not yet figured out when exactly).

And, well, I guess I've only once seen a number other than "3". I can't quite remember but I think it was a "4" and there were two edits.

So, it looks like there are two invisible suggested edits waiting for me... But it's definitely different as what I've seen on ELU.

Has anyone else seen this bug? Anything I can do to get this resolved?

Answer 1

As Wrzlprmft explained in his answer to a recent related question, the observed difference between German.SE and EL&U is due to your reputation being different. If you had 10k on EL&U, you would see the same behaviour there.

When you have at least 10k (graduated sites) or at least 2k (beta sites) of reputation, the orange indicator will show the number of review items in all queues, not just suggested edits, but on a non-individualized basis: It will include items that you already reviewed or skipped or are ineligible for. Furthermore, the indicator will only be shown if there are at least three items, so you will never see a 1 or 2 there. Higher numbers can and do appear, as you noticed yourself, but having that many open items for review is a rare occurrence on German.SE. I believe the highest number I've ever seen was 7.

It is, I think, generally accepted that this behaviour is less than ideal. However, it would consume too much processing time to check for the individualized status of all review queues for each page view.