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. And what could be more festive than a big pile of numbers? So here is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Mathematics over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
----------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 204 124
Users destroyed³ 199 0
Users deleted 313 0
Users contacted 304 0
User suspensions lifted early 4 0
User review-bans lifted early 4 0
User banned from review 62 0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue 55 63,685
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue 8 23,345
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue 29 63,404
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue 1 8,845
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue 7 53,793
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue 988 113,993
Tags merged 30 0
Tag synonyms proposed 18 2
Tag synonyms created 18 2
Questions unprotected 0 8
Questions reopened 86 1,009
Questions protected 12 122
Questions migrated 31 64
Questions merged 120 0
Questions flagged⁵ 19 17,535
Questions closed 1,611 32,551
Question flags handled⁵ 2,498 15,095
Posts unlocked 21 76
Posts undeleted 272 10,685
Posts locked 173 366
Posts deleted⁶ 1,769 84,892
Posts bumped 0 8,607
Escalations to the Community Manager team 46 0
Comments undeleted 200 0
Comments flagged 144 10,321
Comments deleted⁷ 17,139 95,757
Comment flags handled 7,829 2,653
Bounties canceled 6 0
Answers flagged 132 11,198
Answer flags handled 3,394 7,941
All comments on a post moved to chat 221 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 A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁴ 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.
⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:
Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? I posted a similar report here last year: 2018: a year in moderation...
You can also check out this report on other sites
- Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites
Wishing you all a happy new year...
