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 Politics breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 20 19
Users destroyed 33 0
Users deleted 11 0
Users contacted 40 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 30 2,057
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 0 1,771
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 4 1,371
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 0 251
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 1 1,503
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 0 3,685
Tags merged 3 0
Tag synonyms proposed 3 2
Tag synonyms created 3 0
Questions unprotected 7 4
Questions reopened 53 105
Questions protected 113 53
Questions migrated 56 1
Questions flagged⁴ 0 787
Questions closed 297 597
Question flags handled⁴ 498 289
Posts unlocked 8 21
Posts undeleted 19 57
Posts locked 17 103
Posts deleted⁵ 358 1,070
Posts bumped 0 88
Escalations to the CM team 2 0
Comments undeleted 363 0
Comments flagged 1 2,415
Comments deleted⁶ 9,708 2,417
Comment flags handled 2,193 223
Answers flagged 0 1,390
Answer flags handled 716 674
All comments on a post moved to chat 165 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Politics 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...
