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 Computer Science breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 14 20
Users destroyed 25 0
Users deleted 28 0
Users contacted 30 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 68 1,691
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 0 305
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 8 620
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 0 358
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 0 4,676
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 7 4,213
Tags merged 3 0
Tag synonyms proposed 3 1
Tag synonyms created 3 0
Questions reopened 46 4
Questions protected 2 11
Questions migrated 74 0
Questions merged 3 0
Questions flagged⁴ 24 1,459
Questions closed 1,180 595
Question flags handled⁴ 501 982
Posts unlocked 1 20
Posts undeleted 23 201
Posts locked 2 124
Posts deleted⁵ 349 3,668
Posts bumped 0 3,065
Escalations to the CM team 1 0
Comments undeleted 58 0
Comments flagged 269 1,060
Comments deleted⁶ 3,097 3,178
Comment flags handled 762 567
Bounties canceled 2 0
Answers flagged 12 585
Answer flags handled 490 107
All comments on a post moved to chat 36 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Computer Science 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...
