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 Cross Validated breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 24 18
Users destroyed 33 0
Users deleted 2 0
Users contacted 51 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 1,525 5,169
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 963 3,759
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 938 2,752
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 57 2,417
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 234 18,159
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 5,125 19,257
Tags merged 34 0
Tag synonyms proposed 34 2
Tag synonyms created 31 1
Tag highlight language set 8 0
Revisions redacted 1 0
Questions unprotected 2 0
Questions reopened 716 34
Questions protected 18 120
Questions migrated 334 23
Questions merged 26 0
Questions flagged⁴ 9 3,152
Questions closed 8,834 2,261
Question flags handled⁴ 1,342 1,819
Posts unlocked 10 73
Posts undeleted 71 509
Posts locked 51 581
Posts deleted⁵ 2,047 21,399
Posts bumped 0 8,733
Escalations to the CM team 6 0
Comments undeleted 129 0
Comments flagged 9 4,794
Comments deleted⁶ 3,596 10,518
Comment flags handled 1,726 3,077
Bounties canceled 16 0
Answers flagged 29 3,033
Answer flags handled 2,735 327
All comments on a post moved to chat 29 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Cross Validated 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...
