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 Space Exploration breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 7 9
Users destroyed 11 0
Users deleted 1 0
Users contacted 23 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 77 1,190
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 11 472
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 24 936
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 0 370
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 9 1,583
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 55 1,889
Tags merged 4 0
Tag synonyms proposed 5 1
Tag synonyms created 5 0
Questions unprotected 0 1
Questions reopened 39 31
Questions protected 5 44
Questions migrated 19 1
Questions merged 1 0
Questions flagged⁴ 1 252
Questions closed 133 374
Question flags handled⁴ 158 95
Posts unlocked 1 5
Posts undeleted 18 71
Posts locked 4 43
Posts deleted⁵ 392 687
Posts bumped 0 114
Escalations to the CM team 4 0
Comments undeleted 11 0
Comments flagged 0 766
Comments deleted⁶ 1,605 3,984
Comment flags handled 433 333
Bounties canceled 1 0
Answers flagged 9 1,248
Answer flags handled 844 413
All comments on a post moved to chat 45 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Space Exploration 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...
