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 Unix & Linux breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 6 28
Users destroyed 58 0
Users deleted 49 0
Users contacted 8 0
User banned from review 2 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 297 13,656
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 240 4,514
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 106 13,444
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 41 5,429
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 188 21,442
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 560 29,795
Tags merged 3 0
Tag synonyms proposed 3 7
Tag synonyms created 3 2
Tag highlight language set 1 0
Revisions redacted 12 0
Questions unprotected 0 1
Questions reopened 134 179
Questions protected 6 147
Questions migrated 79 175
Questions merged 6 0
Questions flagged⁴ 23 2,491
Questions closed 1,129 7,063
Question flags handled⁴ 588 1,926
Posts unlocked 8 81
Posts undeleted 50 784
Posts locked 9 504
Posts deleted⁵ 2,298 13,679
Posts bumped 0 8,727
Escalations to the CM team 20 0
Comments undeleted 107 0
Comments flagged 6 7,879
Comments deleted⁶ 6,696 19,621
Comment flags handled 3,170 4,715
Answers flagged 53 8,514
Answer flags handled 4,932 3,635
All comments on a post moved to chat 35 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Unix & Linux 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...
