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 Ask Ubuntu breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 9 138
Users destroyed 295 0
Users deleted 19 0
Users contacted 35 0
User suspensions lifted early 2 0
User banned from review 0 24
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 223 31,266
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 17 5,351
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 25 38,610
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 2 13,291
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 2 45,245
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 56 35,612
Tags merged 4 0
Tag synonyms proposed 8 3
Tag synonyms created 7 0
Revisions redacted 11 0
Questions unprotected 0 13
Questions reopened 117 338
Questions protected 21 634
Questions migrated 34 35
Questions merged 43 0
Questions flagged⁴ 192 37,041
Questions closed 808 14,513
Question flags handled⁴ 1,849 35,384
Posts unlocked 10 21
Posts undeleted 98 957
Posts locked 52 5,447
Posts deleted⁵ 5,829 36,338
Posts bumped 0 8,731
Escalations to the CM team 3 0
Comments undeleted 83 0
Comments flagged 4 12,314
Comments deleted⁶ 10,219 27,302
Comment flags handled 5,524 6,794
Bounties canceled 5 0
Answers flagged 128 21,254
Answer flags handled 11,964 9,418
All comments on a post moved to chat 145 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 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...
