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 Database Administrators over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
----------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 9 12
Users destroyed³ 60 0
Users deleted 95 0
Users contacted 15 0
User suspensions lifted early 1 0
User review-bans lifted early 2 0
User banned from review 2 0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue 248 4,263
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue 21 996
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue 260 2,373
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue 14 1,452
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue 171 8,420
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue 509 12,053
Tags merged 21 0
Tag synonyms proposed 19 0
Tag synonyms created 19 0
Revisions redacted 1 0
Questions unprotected 4 0
Questions reopened 57 26
Questions protected 14 47
Questions migrated 28 54
Questions merged 2 0
Questions flagged⁵ 13 867
Questions closed 821 2,707
Question flags handled⁵ 251 628
Posts unlocked 5 33
Posts undeleted 27 262
Posts locked 8 246
Posts deleted⁶ 1,090 6,742
Posts bumped 0 8,610
Escalations to the Community Manager team 1 0
Comments undeleted 409 0
Comments flagged 105 4,434
Comments deleted⁷ 15,220 6,713
Comment flags handled 2,699 1,842
Answers flagged 60 2,352
Answer flags handled 2,018 399
All comments on a post moved to chat 38 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 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...