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 Webmasters breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 6 31
Users destroyed 258 0
Users deleted 10 0
Users contacted 15 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 478 344
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 234 81
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 266 85
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 326 127
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 1,705 1,124
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 496 146
Tags merged 3 0
Tag synonyms proposed 4 0
Tag synonyms created 4 0
Revisions redacted 2 0
Questions unprotected 1 0
Questions reopened 167 0
Questions protected 40 44
Questions migrated 103 0
Questions merged 2 0
Questions flagged⁴ 2 798
Questions closed 1,935 3
Question flags handled⁴ 378 422
Posts unlocked 3 24
Posts undeleted 36 27
Posts locked 20 252
Posts deleted⁵ 797 1,808
Posts bumped 0 1,112
Comments undeleted 49 0
Comments flagged 0 1,044
Comments deleted⁶ 1,090 1,176
Comment flags handled 289 755
Bounties canceled 1 0
Answers flagged 5 1,170
Answer flags handled 853 322
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Webmasters 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...
