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 Beer, Wine & Spirits breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 0 6
Users destroyed 4 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 24 11
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 4 6
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 36 27
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 100 43
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 19 11
Questions reopened 1 0
Questions protected 0 2
Questions migrated 4 0
Questions flagged⁴ 0 21
Questions closed 24 1
Question flags handled⁴ 14 7
Posts undeleted 3 3
Posts locked 0 9
Posts deleted⁵ 47 35
Posts bumped 0 22
Comments flagged 1 39
Comments deleted⁶ 30 58
Comment flags handled 20 20
Answers flagged 2 96
Answer flags handled 71 27
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Beer, Wine & Spirits 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...
