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. And what could be more festive than a big pile of numbers? So here is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Astronomy over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
----------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 17 10
Users destroyed³ 14 0
Users deleted 7 0
Users contacted 25 0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue 16 748
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue 0 257
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue 1 611
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue 0 224
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue 0 1,200
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue 4 1,540
Tags merged 6 0
Tag synonyms proposed 4 0
Tag synonyms created 4 0
Questions unprotected 0 3
Questions reopened 13 3
Questions protected 3 34
Questions migrated 21 0
Questions merged 3 0
Questions flagged⁵ 7 1,047
Questions closed 65 314
Question flags handled⁵ 125 926
Posts unlocked 0 4
Posts undeleted 15 35
Posts locked 3 189
Posts deleted⁶ 251 728
Posts bumped 0 107
Escalations to the Community Manager team 4 0
Comments undeleted 6 0
Comments flagged 9 447
Comments deleted⁷ 635 1,151
Comment flags handled 250 205
Answers flagged 10 664
Answer flags handled 503 167
All comments on a post moved to chat 14 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 A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁴ 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.
⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:
Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? I posted a similar report here last year: 2018: a year in moderation...
You can also check out this report on other sites
- Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites
Wishing you all a happy new year...
