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 Astronomy breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 4 8
Users destroyed 13 0
Users deleted 3 0
Users contacted 17 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 27 681
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 1 210
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 2 351
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 0 226
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 0 1,216
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 30 1,483
Tags merged 2 0
Tag synonyms proposed 2 1
Tag synonyms created 2 0
Questions unprotected 0 2
Questions reopened 13 7
Questions protected 4 15
Questions migrated 17 1
Questions merged 2 0
Questions flagged⁴ 3 3,941
Questions closed 81 302
Question flags handled⁴ 94 3,850
Posts unlocked 0 2
Posts undeleted 5 30
Posts locked 1 659
Posts deleted⁵ 219 1,107
Posts bumped 0 173
Escalations to the CM team 2 0
Comments undeleted 2 0
Comments flagged 6 466
Comments deleted⁶ 486 807
Comment flags handled 311 161
Answers flagged 3 659
Answer flags handled 508 154
All comments on a post moved to chat 2 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Astronomy 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...
