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 Academia over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
----------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 25 36
Users destroyed³ 391 0
Users deleted 15 0
Users contacted 54 0
User suspensions lifted early 1 0
User banned from review 2 0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue 33 1,690
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue 0 1,040
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue 21 1,695
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue 1 505
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue 18 4,574
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue 26 6,985
Tags merged 23 0
Tag synonyms proposed 6 0
Tag synonyms created 5 2
Revisions redacted 17 0
Questions reopened 23 36
Questions protected 77 158
Questions migrated 32 2
Questions flagged⁵ 83 2,719
Questions closed 382 1,972
Question flags handled⁵ 806 1,997
Posts unlocked 3 6
Posts undeleted 33 69
Posts locked 8 464
Posts deleted⁶ 528 2,848
Posts bumped 0 352
Escalations to the Community Manager team 22 0
Comments undeleted 250 0
Comments flagged 59 2,429
Comments deleted⁷ 6,643 3,565
Comment flags handled 1,553 933
Bounties canceled 1 0
Answers flagged 122 2,428
Answer flags handled 1,680 869
All comments on a post moved to chat 204 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 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...
