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 Buddhism breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 12 4
Users destroyed 5 0
Users deleted 2 0
Users contacted 18 0
User suspensions lifted early 1 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 99 69
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 11 0
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 62 9
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 101 93
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 339 118
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 30 7
Revisions redacted 4 0
Questions reopened 17 0
Questions protected 37 2
Questions migrated 6 0
Questions merged 3 0
Questions flagged⁴ 5 152
Questions closed 128 3
Question flags handled⁴ 105 52
Posts unlocked 2 4
Posts undeleted 18 54
Posts locked 6 26
Posts deleted⁵ 192 308
Posts bumped 0 265
Comments undeleted 78 0
Comments flagged 6 416
Comments deleted⁶ 1,780 960
Comment flags handled 189 233
Answers flagged 12 173
Answer flags handled 173 12
All comments on a post moved to chat 73 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Buddhism 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...
