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 TeX - LaTeX breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 3 15
Users destroyed 8 0
Users deleted 4 0
Users contacted 13 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 122 5,016
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 0 1,314
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 74 8,591
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 4 1,744
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 0 10,769
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 55 18,187
Tag synonyms proposed 0 2
Questions unprotected 0 1
Questions reopened 17 154
Questions protected 1 48
Questions migrated 9 6
Questions merged 1 0
Questions flagged⁴ 5 1,052
Questions closed 124 5,224
Question flags handled⁴ 227 830
Posts unlocked 0 1
Posts undeleted 16 497
Posts locked 1 75
Posts deleted⁵ 445 6,955
Posts bumped 0 4,369
Escalations to the CM team 3 0
Comments undeleted 12 0
Comments flagged 0 13,493
Comments deleted⁶ 7,984 20,085
Comment flags handled 6,604 6,889
Answers flagged 8 4,529
Answer flags handled 1,155 3,382
All comments on a post moved to chat 31 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of TeX - LaTeX 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...
