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 Signal Processing breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 5 8
Users destroyed 3 0
Users contacted 9 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 55 756
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 14 200
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 7 370
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 0 279
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 143 2,198
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 421 2,701
Tags merged 1 0
Tag synonyms proposed 1 0
Tag synonyms created 1 0
Questions reopened 22 0
Questions protected 2 4
Questions migrated 14 0
Questions merged 2 0
Questions flagged⁴ 0 286
Questions closed 469 478
Question flags handled⁴ 75 211
Posts unlocked 0 10
Posts undeleted 8 74
Posts locked 4 41
Posts deleted⁵ 246 2,107
Posts bumped 0 5,758
Comments flagged 0 636
Comments deleted⁶ 317 1,746
Comment flags handled 116 520
Answers flagged 0 446
Answer flags handled 413 33
All comments on a post moved to chat 10 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Signal Processing 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...
