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 Electrical Engineering breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 10 24
Users destroyed 97 0
Users deleted 4 0
Users contacted 35 0
User suspensions lifted early 1 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 288 5,640
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 227 2,452
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 299 3,540
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 141 2,643
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 238 14,259
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 518 15,391
Tags merged 7 0
Tag synonyms proposed 4 4
Tag synonyms created 5 1
Questions reopened 110 15
Questions protected 45 126
Questions migrated 395 13
Questions merged 14 0
Questions flagged⁴ 11 3,066
Questions closed 2,707 4,285
Question flags handled⁴ 1,048 2,029
Posts unlocked 0 100
Posts undeleted 60 472
Posts locked 25 583
Posts deleted⁵ 2,681 10,531
Posts bumped 0 8,729
Escalations to the CM team 1 0
Comments undeleted 76 0
Comments flagged 2 5,198
Comments deleted⁶ 5,116 12,963
Comment flags handled 1,676 3,524
Bounties canceled 2 0
Answers flagged 60 7,601
Answer flags handled 6,770 891
All comments on a post moved to chat 88 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Electrical Engineering 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...
