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 Web Applications breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 6 14
Users destroyed 165 0
Users deleted 4 0
Users contacted 8 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 199 1,657
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 31 64
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 346 2,147
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 148 1,101
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 162 4,172
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 1,030 2,028
Tag synonyms proposed 0 1
Revisions redacted 7 0
Questions unprotected 3 2
Questions reopened 13 1
Questions protected 1 235
Questions migrated 182 5
Questions merged 2 0
Questions flagged⁴ 49 2,109
Questions closed 1,350 160
Question flags handled⁴ 493 1,665
Posts unlocked 2 31
Posts undeleted 27 38
Posts locked 5 822
Posts deleted⁵ 1,611 2,888
Posts bumped 0 4,717
Escalations to the CM team 3 0
Comments undeleted 4 0
Comments flagged 0 849
Comments deleted⁶ 520 1,543
Comment flags handled 458 391
Bounties canceled 1 0
Answers flagged 144 4,897
Answer flags handled 4,049 992
All comments on a post moved to chat 1 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Web Applications 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...
