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 Personal Finance & Money breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 3 30
Users destroyed 311 0
Users deleted 8 0
Users contacted 7 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 139 1,917
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 22 387
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 16 680
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 5 469
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 77 3,728
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 363 3,689
Tag synonyms proposed 1 0
Tag synonyms created 1 0
Questions unprotected 1 1
Questions reopened 18 9
Questions protected 72 246
Questions migrated 36 2
Questions merged 1 0
Questions flagged⁴ 7 1,384
Questions closed 658 639
Question flags handled⁴ 459 932
Posts unlocked 4 15
Posts undeleted 32 59
Posts locked 12 305
Posts deleted⁵ 786 1,819
Posts bumped 0 1,322
Escalations to the CM team 2 0
Comments undeleted 90 0
Comments flagged 1,183 1,323
Comments deleted⁶ 3,690 1,913
Comment flags handled 2,078 428
Answers flagged 30 2,851
Answer flags handled 1,658 1,223
All comments on a post moved to chat 64 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Personal Finance & Money 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...
