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. And what could be more festive than a big pile of numbers? So here is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Ask Ubuntu over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
----------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 15 62
Users destroyed³ 508 0
Users deleted 10 0
Users contacted 37 0
User suspensions lifted early 2 0
User banned from review 0 12
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue 153 21,742
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue 6 3,352
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue 27 21,994
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue 0 11,884
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue 2 37,414
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue 50 19,947
Tags merged 2 0
Tag synonyms proposed 3 5
Tag synonyms created 7 0
Tag highlight language set 1 0
Revisions redacted 4 0
Questions unprotected 0 15
Questions reopened 59 257
Questions protected 84 621
Questions migrated 38 24
Questions merged 15 0
Questions flagged⁵ 200 27,657
Questions closed 800 9,678
Question flags handled⁵ 1,708 26,141
Posts unlocked 8 15
Posts undeleted 77 674
Posts locked 23 4,317
Posts deleted⁶ 5,675 32,726
Posts bumped 0 8,621
Escalations to the Community Manager team 3 0
Comments undeleted 83 0
Comments flagged 2 14,279
Comments deleted⁷ 7,513 30,022
Comment flags handled 3,515 10,765
Bounties canceled 4 0
Answers flagged 172 17,760
Answer flags handled 11,917 6,028
All comments on a post moved to chat 152 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Ask Ubuntu 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 A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁴ 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.
⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:
Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? I posted a similar report here last year: 2018: a year in moderation...
You can also check out this report on other sites
- Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites
Wishing you all a happy new year...
