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:
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...
