Ping @Etonkovidova for visibility.

Thanks for the task, @Trizek-WMF! I checked what might be happening, and I found out that if you open multiple Add Link sessions in separate tabs, then you are able to complete all of them. This is because the quality gate limit is checked when you open Special:Homepage and when showing the recommendation to the user, but once you have the recommendation on the screen, you can always complete it.

This would explain the relatively low number of Add Link edits; it is completely practical to open 3 or 4 recommendations in tabs, but you probably wouldn't do that with a hundred of recommendations. It also explains why we noticed the bug only now (although T344163 was another subtle bug in the same feature).

I'm wondering whether there is any way to verify the user is indeed loading multiple suggestions at once, or whether we should just fix that possibility (given it exists) and hope it would solve the issue the community reported. @Trizek-WMF, do you have any thoughts on this?

@Trizek-WMF - thx, for pinging me. Yes, the issue happens just as @Urbanecm_WMF described in the comment above.

I edited the description to make it about fixing the bug, as the investigation happened. Let's take a look at it during the next sprint planning meeting.

Good catch!

In T383414#10448865, @Urbanecm_WMF wrote:

I'm wondering whether there is any way to verify the user is indeed loading multiple suggestions at once, or whether we should just fix that possibility (given it exists) and hope it would solve the issue the community reported. @Trizek-WMF, do you have any thoughts on this?

It could be tricky.
AFACT, you can't prevent links from being opened in new tabs.
Would it be possible to catch the process while the new tab loads, to show a message saying that you exceeded the number of tasks for the day? It could be super frustrating if this number is lower than the number of tasks you are ready to tackle. In particular when this number is really low.
I guess we all agree on not showing a blocker when the user completes the tasks and is ready to save. This would be super counter productive.

The problem is that if you open ten tabs in the background, all ten start to load, so at the point it loads, the places are still available.

What about introducing some kind of locking? When VE loads with the suggested edit, it acquires a lock (of which one can acquire as many as they have remaining suggested edits for the day), which is released when one exits VE without saving. If there are no remaining locks, VE waits for one to become available (or for all edits to be saved, at which point it can give up). Maybe there could be a “Retry” button instead of automatically noticing the lock release, as the button is much easier to implement in a client/server architecture.