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 Gardening & Landscaping breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 1 9
Users destroyed 22 0
Users contacted 3 0
User banned from review 1 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 38 229
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 6 23
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 145 188
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 60 227
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 123 1,254
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 38 251
Tags merged 1 0
Questions reopened 6 0
Questions protected 2 11
Questions migrated 9 0
Questions merged 1 0
Questions flagged⁴ 5 64
Questions closed 93 32
Question flags handled⁴ 51 18
Posts undeleted 3 7
Posts locked 1 40
Posts deleted⁵ 314 182
Posts bumped 0 657
Escalations to the CM team 1 0
Comments undeleted 6 0
Comments flagged 11 204
Comments deleted⁶ 358 561
Comment flags handled 82 133
Answers flagged 28 527
Answer flags handled 477 78
All comments on a post moved to chat 2 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Gardening & Landscaping 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...
