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 Parenting breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 3 12
Users destroyed 31 0
Users deleted 8 0
Users contacted 4 0
User suspensions lifted early 1 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 213 652
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 22 147
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 12 104
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 28 195
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 68 820
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 58 428
Tags merged 2 0
Tag synonyms proposed 2 2
Tag synonyms created 4 0
Revisions redacted 3 0
Questions unprotected 1 0
Questions reopened 27 2
Questions protected 14 45
Questions migrated 8 1
Questions flagged⁴ 6 257
Questions closed 283 32
Question flags handled⁴ 179 84
Posts unlocked 0 6
Posts undeleted 16 8
Posts locked 5 72
Posts deleted⁵ 782 464
Posts bumped 0 36
Escalations to the CM team 2 0
Comments undeleted 58 0
Comments flagged 2 374
Comments deleted⁶ 2,024 469
Comment flags handled 266 110
Answers flagged 27 1,252
Answer flags handled 1,081 198
All comments on a post moved to chat 54 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Parenting 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...