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 Super User breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 106 337
Users destroyed 3,777 0
Users deleted 24 0
Users contacted 153 0
User suspensions lifted early 5 0
User banned from review 0 19
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 467 22,226
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 15 6,273
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 43 17,709
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 2 14,168
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 24 40,710
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 93 26,001
Tags merged 6 0
Tag synonyms proposed 3 0
Tag synonyms created 3 0
Revisions redacted 18 0
Questions unprotected 2 4
Questions reopened 217 243
Questions protected 5 894
Questions migrated 829 142
Questions merged 6 0
Questions flagged⁴ 587 18,138
Questions closed 6,820 4,860
Question flags handled⁴ 4,065 14,660
Posts unlocked 15 225
Posts undeleted 100 609
Posts locked 11 5,258
Posts deleted⁵ 7,790 29,709
Posts bumped 0 17,462
Escalations to the CM team 3 0
Comments undeleted 64 0
Comments flagged 35 16,052
Comments deleted⁶ 11,128 24,244
Comment flags handled 8,426 7,661
Bounties canceled 10 0
Answers flagged 1,036 21,288
Answer flags handled 17,830 4,494
All comments on a post moved to chat 58 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Super User 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...
