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 Game Development breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 3 16
Users destroyed 7 0
Users deleted 3 0
Users contacted 7 0
User banned from review 1 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 387 760
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 63 37
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 91 87
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 167 223
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 293 2,653
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 239 300
Tags merged 9 0
Tag synonyms proposed 10 0
Tag synonyms created 6 0
Tag highlight language set 1 0
Questions reopened 58 0
Questions protected 10 9
Questions migrated 4 0
Questions merged 3 0
Questions flagged⁴ 17 598
Questions closed 947 38
Question flags handled⁴ 330 285
Posts unlocked 1 3
Posts undeleted 10 93
Posts locked 4 68
Posts deleted⁵ 398 2,610
Posts bumped 0 8,733
Comments undeleted 25 0
Comments flagged 18 1,399
Comments deleted⁶ 2,341 2,264
Comment flags handled 363 1,054
Bounties canceled 1 0
Answers flagged 49 662
Answer flags handled 598 113
All comments on a post moved to chat 14 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Game Development 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...
