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 English Language & Usage breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 14 48
Users destroyed 515 0
Users deleted 29 0
Users contacted 35 0
User suspensions lifted early 1 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 134 7,121
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 58 4,420
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 13 15,846
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 21 3,705
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 17 17,119
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 200 23,899
Tags merged 24 0
Tag synonyms proposed 35 2
Tag synonyms created 38 1
Questions unprotected 3 13
Questions reopened 154 154
Questions protected 911 203
Questions migrated 469 459
Questions merged 20 0
Questions flagged⁴ 69 5,634
Questions closed 4,343 6,418
Question flags handled⁴ 1,413 4,290
Posts unlocked 12 179
Posts undeleted 57 423
Posts locked 38 1,854
Posts deleted⁵ 2,447 12,477
Posts bumped 0 7,274
Escalations to the CM team 4 0
Comments undeleted 121 0
Comments flagged 321 8,651
Comments deleted⁶ 10,775 16,694
Comment flags handled 3,536 5,436
Bounties canceled 1 0
Answers flagged 290 8,970
Answer flags handled 5,990 3,270
All comments on a post moved to chat 224 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of English Language & Usage 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 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, 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...
