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 Science Fiction & Fantasy breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 11 17
Users destroyed 160 0
Users deleted 19 0
Users contacted 26 0
User banned from review 3 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 57 4,584
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 65 2,706
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 229 9,725
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 96 3,508
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 137 7,666
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 88 6,992
Tags merged 60 0
Tag synonyms proposed 9 4
Tag synonyms created 11 2
Revisions redacted 2 0
Questions unprotected 2 10
Questions reopened 93 217
Questions protected 24 313
Questions migrated 25 4
Questions merged 4 0
Questions flagged⁴ 4 1,164
Questions closed 128 1,838
Question flags handled⁴ 389 779
Posts unlocked 10 26
Posts undeleted 63 133
Posts locked 12 241
Posts deleted⁵ 958 3,589
Posts bumped 0 664
Escalations to the CM team 4 0
Comments undeleted 107 0
Comments flagged 15 3,651
Comments deleted⁶ 6,108 4,825
Comment flags handled 2,981 685
Answers flagged 49 8,609
Answer flags handled 2,595 6,063
All comments on a post moved to chat 51 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Science Fiction & Fantasy 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 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.
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...
