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 Graphic Design breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 5 18
Users destroyed 1,347 0
Users contacted 21 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 102 1,894
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 30 332
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 147 1,225
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 28 855
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 78 3,991
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 302 5,123
Tags merged 6 0
Tag synonyms proposed 6 0
Tag synonyms created 6 0
Revisions redacted 1 0
Questions reopened 54 12
Questions protected 18 55
Questions migrated 30 0
Questions flagged⁴ 279 9,996
Questions closed 514 1,093
Question flags handled⁴ 1,519 8,756
Posts unlocked 6 6
Posts undeleted 9 94
Posts locked 9 1,788
Posts deleted⁵ 700 3,711
Posts bumped 0 4,562
Escalations to the CM team 2 0
Comments undeleted 42 0
Comments flagged 83 1,131
Comments deleted⁶ 1,371 2,497
Comment flags handled 485 729
Answers flagged 92 2,021
Answer flags handled 1,740 373
All comments on a post moved to chat 18 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Graphic Design 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...
