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 Database Administrators breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 17 21
Users destroyed 124 0
Users deleted 32 0
Users contacted 21 0
User banned from review 3 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 293 5,576
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 13 1,564
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 163 3,191
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 1 1,442
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 15 9,191
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 298 11,735
Tags merged 6 0
Tag synonyms proposed 10 0
Tag synonyms created 10 0
Revisions redacted 8 0
Questions unprotected 2 1
Questions reopened 98 66
Questions protected 1 26
Questions migrated 27 90
Questions merged 10 0
Questions flagged⁴ 56 1,160
Questions closed 518 2,821
Question flags handled⁴ 445 771
Posts unlocked 4 40
Posts undeleted 50 246
Posts locked 18 351
Posts deleted⁵ 1,364 5,016
Posts bumped 0 8,728
Escalations to the CM team 4 0
Comments undeleted 257 0
Comments flagged 101 3,737
Comments deleted⁶ 11,349 6,558
Comment flags handled 2,428 1,410
Bounties canceled 7 0
Answers flagged 63 2,656
Answer flags handled 2,242 477
All comments on a post moved to chat 31 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Database Administrators 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...
