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 Ask Different breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 5 31
Users destroyed 582 0
Users deleted 5 0
Users contacted 38 0
User suspensions lifted early 1 0
User banned from review 1 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 1,675 3,399
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 254 675
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 513 2,666
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 1,242 2,564
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 3,373 8,054
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 1,477 3,328
Tags merged 169 0
Tag synonyms proposed 10 1
Tag synonyms created 9 0
Revisions redacted 7 0
Questions unprotected 11 0
Questions reopened 260 2
Questions protected 92 441
Questions migrated 45 1
Questions merged 12 0
Questions flagged⁴ 522 8,757
Questions closed 2,189 479
Question flags handled⁴ 2,611 6,668
Posts unlocked 6 10
Posts undeleted 104 186
Posts locked 15 2,060
Posts deleted⁵ 3,687 10,981
Posts bumped 0 8,728
Escalations to the CM team 3 0
Comments undeleted 39 0
Comments flagged 201 2,632
Comments deleted⁶ 3,805 5,276
Comment flags handled 1,110 1,723
Bounties canceled 1 0
Answers flagged 518 6,825
Answer flags handled 6,541 802
All comments on a post moved to chat 44 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Ask Different 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 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, 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...
