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. And what could be more festive than a big pile of numbers? So here is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Software Engineering over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
----------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 2 33
Users destroyed³ 9 0
Users deleted 4 0
Users contacted 2 1
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue 69 2,403
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue 19 769
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue 4 434
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue 2 443
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue 21 4,052
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue 91 3,003
Tags merged 8 0
Tag synonyms proposed 3 1
Tag synonyms created 4 0
Tag highlight language set 1 0
Questions unprotected 1 16
Questions reopened 93 9
Questions protected 5 355
Questions migrated 89 22
Questions merged 1 0
Questions flagged⁵ 10 4,830
Questions closed 2,784 1,698
Question flags handled⁵ 1,554 3,271
Posts unlocked 4 29
Posts undeleted 27 121
Posts locked 18 242
Posts deleted⁶ 2,627 4,148
Posts bumped 0 1,240
Escalations to the Community Manager team 4 0
Comments undeleted 55 1
Comments flagged 0 2,624
Comments deleted⁷ 1,422 3,932
Comment flags handled 469 2,154
Bounties canceled 1 0
Answers flagged 19 612
Answer flags handled 390 240
All comments on a post moved to chat 5 1
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 A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁴ 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.
⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:
Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? I posted a similar report here last year: 2018: a year in moderation...
You can also check out this report on other sites
- Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites
Wishing you all a happy new year...
