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 Physics breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 50 40
Users destroyed 31 0
Users deleted 176 0
Users contacted 72 0
User banned from review 3 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 315 8,143
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 200 4,506
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 15 10,043
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 1 2,908
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 11 15,200
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 284 26,538
Tags merged 21 0
Tag synonyms proposed 37 0
Tag synonyms created 32 0
Questions unprotected 5 0
Questions reopened 154 52
Questions protected 545 286
Questions migrated 171 65
Questions merged 5 0
Questions flagged⁴ 20 5,947
Questions closed 5,303 6,995
Question flags handled⁴ 1,601 4,366
Posts unlocked 2 68
Posts undeleted 95 761
Posts locked 13 521
Posts deleted⁵ 2,195 17,375
Posts bumped 0 8,729
Escalations to the CM team 6 0
Comments undeleted 672 0
Comments flagged 13 5,500
Comments deleted⁶ 17,158 14,357
Comment flags handled 2,346 3,167
Bounties canceled 6 0
Answers flagged 80 6,867
Answer flags handled 4,738 2,209
All comments on a post moved to chat 203 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Physics 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...
