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 Stack Overflow breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 1,631 1,269
Users destroyed 4,750 0
Users deleted 5,484 0
Users contacted 5,689 0
User suspensions lifted early 55 0
User review-bans lifted early 68 0
User banned from review 439 4,519
Tasks reviewed³: Triage queue 13 1,329,907
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 1,229 1,177,058
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 20 200,214
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 71 631,186
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 11 312,478
Tasks reviewed³: Helper queue 2 40,210
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 27 835,061
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 611 440,336
Tags merged 127 0
Tag synonyms proposed 351 176
Tag synonyms created 413 64
Tag highlight language set 7 0
Revisions redacted 517 0
Questions unprotected 11 67
Questions reopened 1,068 8,860
Questions protected 184 6,212
Questions migrated 459 914
Questions merged 52 0
Questions flagged⁴ 1,453 592,454
Questions closed 22,180 331,769
Question flags handled⁴ 38,092 555,815
Posts unlocked 143 676
Posts undeleted 2,382 79,917
Posts locked 381 8,886
Posts deleted⁵ 92,577 1,370,172
Posts bumped 0 34,820
Escalations to the CM team 1,578 0
Comments undeleted 1,275 0
Comments flagged 1,634 345,828
Comments deleted⁶ 303,700 1,006,020
Comment flags handled 211,510 135,952
Bounties canceled 224 0
Answers flagged 3,504 462,254
Answer flags handled 219,741 246,017
All comments on a post moved to chat 1,569 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Stack Overflow 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 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, 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...
