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 Academia breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 24 30
Users destroyed 264 0
Users deleted 13 0
Users contacted 48 0
User banned from review 2 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 49 2,528
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 8 1,323
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 21 2,175
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 3 568
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 15 4,946
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 74 8,595
Tags merged 37 0
Tag synonyms proposed 16 0
Tag synonyms created 15 0
Revisions redacted 27 0
Questions unprotected 1 0
Questions reopened 59 54
Questions protected 82 265
Questions migrated 45 4
Questions flagged⁴ 57 2,847
Questions closed 489 1,966
Question flags handled⁴ 829 2,075
Posts unlocked 13 18
Posts undeleted 27 74
Posts locked 24 341
Posts deleted⁵ 499 2,350
Posts bumped 0 366
Escalations to the CM team 19 0
Comments undeleted 267 0
Comments flagged 32 2,926
Comments deleted⁶ 7,410 3,678
Comment flags handled 2,244 714
Answers flagged 135 2,946
Answer flags handled 1,905 1,176
All comments on a post moved to chat 208 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Academia 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...
