It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:
We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
-- A Theory of Moderation
While there certainly are Moderators here, a significant amount of the moderation is done by ordinary people, using the privileges they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.
As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together. To that end, here is how the moderation done here on Writing breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 3 17
Users destroyed 21 0
Users deleted 1 0
Users contacted 5 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 32 912
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 0 443
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 31 810
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 0 238
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 0 1,595
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 0 1,729
Tags merged 3 0
Tag synonyms proposed 0 2
Questions unprotected 0 2
Questions reopened 10 33
Questions protected 4 22
Questions migrated 26 42
Questions merged 4 0
Questions flagged⁴ 15 478
Questions closed 123 426
Question flags handled⁴ 252 241
Posts unlocked 0 27
Posts undeleted 12 19
Posts locked 4 152
Posts deleted⁵ 159 451
Posts bumped 0 20
Escalations to the CM team 1 0
Comments undeleted 39 0
Comments flagged 16 614
Comments deleted⁶ 1,664 970
Comment flags handled 410 220
Answers flagged 115 839
Answer flags handled 609 345
All comments on a post moved to chat 30 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Writing without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
³ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 3 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 3, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁴ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁵ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁶ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Wishing you all a happy new year...
