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 Server Fault breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 11 46
Users destroyed 261 0
Users deleted 6 0
Users contacted 34 0
User banned from review 0 10
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 953 9,176
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 421 1,472
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 355 1,973
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 280 4,258
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 938 17,391
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 1,129 7,186
Tags merged 4 0
Tag synonyms proposed 5 0
Tag synonyms created 5 0
Revisions redacted 10 0
Questions reopened 168 3
Questions protected 34 95
Questions migrated 393 95
Questions merged 4 0
Questions flagged⁴ 43 2,086
Questions closed 5,187 1,164
Question flags handled⁴ 977 1,152
Posts unlocked 4 75
Posts undeleted 48 278
Posts locked 27 937
Posts deleted⁵ 2,818 14,999
Posts bumped 0 17,460
Comments undeleted 31 0
Comments flagged 1 5,156
Comments deleted⁶ 3,321 6,760
Comment flags handled 1,807 3,350
Bounties canceled 4 0
Answers flagged 231 5,207
Answer flags handled 4,614 824
All comments on a post moved to chat 5 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Server Fault 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...
