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 Software Engineering breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 2 34
Users destroyed 37 0
Users deleted 2 0
Users contacted 7 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 22 2,669
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 7 538
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 3 491
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 1 533
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 14 4,818
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 32 1,898
Tags merged 1 0
Tag synonyms proposed 1 0
Tag synonyms created 1 0
Revisions redacted 1 0
Questions unprotected 0 3
Questions reopened 27 4
Questions protected 1 482
Questions migrated 37 12
Questions merged 2 0
Questions flagged⁴ 8 5,203
Questions closed 963 1,765
Question flags handled⁴ 1,681 3,530
Posts unlocked 0 26
Posts undeleted 22 145
Posts locked 12 168
Posts deleted⁵ 1,360 4,051
Posts bumped 0 2,504
Escalations to the CM team 3 0
Comments undeleted 9 0
Comments flagged 0 3,986
Comments deleted⁶ 1,918 5,438
Comment flags handled 1,109 2,877
Answers flagged 22 1,022
Answer flags handled 781 263
All comments on a post moved to chat 11 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Software Engineering 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...
