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 Philosophy breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 11 13
Users destroyed 19 0
Users deleted 6 0
Users contacted 15 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 38 782
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 24 363
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 9 603
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 3 430
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 0 1,823
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 61 3,014
Tags merged 1 0
Tag synonyms proposed 1 1
Tag synonyms created 1 0
Questions reopened 8 4
Questions protected 38 17
Questions migrated 5 1
Questions flagged⁴ 3 406
Questions closed 232 340
Question flags handled⁴ 241 168
Posts unlocked 1 7
Posts undeleted 16 93
Posts locked 8 29
Posts deleted⁵ 590 911
Posts bumped 0 969
Escalations to the CM team 2 0
Comments undeleted 43 0
Comments flagged 17 634
Comments deleted⁶ 3,380 3,431
Comment flags handled 340 311
Answers flagged 17 822
Answer flags handled 731 108
All comments on a post moved to chat 105 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Philosophy 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...
