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 Worldbuilding breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 17 19
Users destroyed 43 0
Users deleted 6 0
Users contacted 40 0
User suspensions lifted early 2 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 289 3,414
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 300 3,856
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 163 5,170
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 48 626
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 335 4,010
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 145 12,668
Tags merged 4 0
Tag synonyms proposed 2 6
Tag synonyms created 14 0
Questions unprotected 1 0
Questions reopened 82 171
Questions protected 121 69
Questions migrated 22 4
Questions flagged⁴ 31 2,063
Questions closed 579 1,932
Question flags handled⁴ 1,031 1,063
Posts unlocked 2 9
Posts undeleted 29 109
Posts locked 3 184
Posts deleted⁵ 552 1,955
Posts bumped 0 4
Escalations to the CM team 7 0
Comments undeleted 126 0
Comments flagged 136 2,065
Comments deleted⁶ 11,302 4,898
Comment flags handled 1,605 596
Answers flagged 317 2,915
Answer flags handled 1,257 1,975
All comments on a post moved to chat 339 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Worldbuilding 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...
