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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 Physics over the past 12 months:

                  Action                  Moderators Community¹
----------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended²                                  83         53
Users destroyed³                                  46          0
Users deleted                                    155          0
Users contacted                                  143          0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue            467     10,842
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue               195      3,911
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue          85      6,387
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue                29      2,339
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue                  5     12,812
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue               567     24,059
Tags merged                                       17          0
Tag synonyms proposed                             30          1
Tag synonyms created                              36          0
Questions unprotected                              1          1
Questions reopened                               104         53
Questions protected                               53        175
Questions migrated                               110         83
Questions merged                                   4          0
Questions flagged⁵                                32      3,695
Questions closed                               4,297      6,237
Question flags handled⁵                        1,225      2,494
Posts unlocked                                     3         67
Posts undeleted                                  119      1,000
Posts locked                                      12        396
Posts deleted⁶                                 1,865     17,313
Posts bumped                                       0      8,619
Escalations to the Community Manager team          5          0
Comments undeleted                               786          0
Comments flagged                                  15      6,789
Comments deleted⁷                             13,540     18,769
Comment flags handled                          1,745      5,064
Bounties canceled                                  7          0
Answers flagged                                  108      4,960
Answer flags handled                           3,703      1,365
All comments on a post moved to chat             254          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 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:

Wishing you all a happy new year...

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Thanks Shog9!

From my perspective I think these numbers look pretty reasonable: the community is handling a majority, though not an overwhelming majority, of moderation tasks in nearly all categories except for things that can only be done by diamond mods. Tag maintenance seems like the one notable exception.

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