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 English Language Learners breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 33 21
Users destroyed 273 0
Users deleted 19 0
Users contacted 39 0
User suspensions lifted early 2 0
User review-bans lifted early 1 0
User banned from review 3 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 304 3,335
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 99 742
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 3 2,369
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 61 1,249
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 11 5,078
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 453 7,449
Tags merged 9 0
Tag synonyms proposed 8 0
Tag synonyms created 7 0
Revisions redacted 11 0
Questions unprotected 8 1
Questions reopened 165 14
Questions protected 42 106
Questions migrated 19 3
Questions merged 12 0
Questions flagged⁴ 15 1,047
Questions closed 1,406 1,036
Question flags handled⁴ 412 650
Posts unlocked 32 15
Posts undeleted 77 140
Posts locked 19 367
Posts deleted⁵ 1,451 3,348
Posts bumped 0 8,720
Escalations to the CM team 3 0
Comments undeleted 331 0
Comments flagged 5 2,941
Comments deleted⁶ 11,263 6,176
Comment flags handled 1,271 1,675
Bounties canceled 1 0
Answers flagged 136 3,356
Answer flags handled 2,906 586
All comments on a post moved to chat 52 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of English Language Learners 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 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.
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...
