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 Mathematics breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 259 85
Users destroyed 204 0
Users deleted 458 0
Users contacted 369 0
User suspensions lifted early 5 0
User review-bans lifted early 1 0
User banned from review 15 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 59 70,701
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 13 26,959
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 49 78,974
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 1 9,586
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 1 58,090
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 524 138,870
Tags merged 15 0
Tag synonyms proposed 11 9
Tag synonyms created 11 2
Revisions redacted 1 0
Questions unprotected 2 11
Questions reopened 138 926
Questions protected 15 211
Questions migrated 68 73
Questions merged 49 0
Questions flagged⁴ 32 21,635
Questions closed 1,954 36,414
Question flags handled⁴ 3,750 17,917
Posts unlocked 37 144
Posts undeleted 337 11,010
Posts locked 199 443
Posts deleted⁵ 2,724 93,573
Posts bumped 0 8,732
Escalations to the CM team 58 0
Comments undeleted 226 0
Comments flagged 266 41,450
Comments deleted⁶ 26,730 122,310
Comment flags handled 13,884 27,832
Bounties canceled 9 0
Answers flagged 88 12,489
Answer flags handled 4,769 7,808
All comments on a post moved to chat 98 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Mathematics 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...
