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 Chemistry breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 11 14
Users destroyed 183 0
Users deleted 9 0
Users contacted 17 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 363 4,706
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 61 1,984
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 345 4,034
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 28 1,017
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 80 6,487
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 174 21,519
Tags merged 2 0
Tag synonyms proposed 2 3
Tag synonyms created 2 0
Revisions redacted 6 0
Questions unprotected 2 0
Questions reopened 157 30
Questions protected 37 53
Questions migrated 9 3
Questions merged 15 0
Questions flagged⁴ 21 2,611
Questions closed 648 4,661
Question flags handled⁴ 542 2,090
Posts unlocked 5 7
Posts undeleted 47 146
Posts locked 19 229
Posts deleted⁵ 1,321 6,471
Posts bumped 0 1,594
Escalations to the CM team 6 0
Comments undeleted 141 0
Comments flagged 979 3,308
Comments deleted⁶ 6,466 3,780
Comment flags handled 3,741 546
Bounties canceled 2 0
Answers flagged 281 3,040
Answer flags handled 2,618 703
All comments on a post moved to chat 30 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Chemistry 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...
