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 Economics breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 2 6
Users destroyed 1 0
Users deleted 4 0
Users contacted 3 0
User banned from review 1 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 27 438
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 0 45
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 3 209
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 3 146
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 38 1,656
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 97 1,919
Tag synonyms proposed 4 0
Tag synonyms created 3 0
Questions protected 2 3
Questions migrated 7 0
Questions flagged⁴ 1 335
Questions closed 194 351
Question flags handled⁴ 285 51
Posts unlocked 0 1
Posts undeleted 5 47
Posts locked 1 13
Posts deleted⁵ 160 1,168
Posts bumped 0 1,359
Escalations to the CM team 2 0
Comments undeleted 3 0
Comments flagged 2 308
Comments deleted⁶ 212 686
Comment flags handled 126 184
Answers flagged 5 275
Answer flags handled 234 46
All comments on a post moved to chat 2 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Economics 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...
