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 Role-playing Games breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 23 14
Users destroyed 606 0
Users deleted 17 0
Users contacted 43 0
User suspensions lifted early 3 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 122 3,047
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 45 3,454
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 18 2,400
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 8 1,091
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 33 3,486
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 83 5,473
Tags merged 26 0
Tag synonyms proposed 24 1
Tag synonyms created 26 0
Revisions redacted 6 0
Questions unprotected 17 1
Questions reopened 437 376
Questions protected 46 139
Questions migrated 10 1
Questions merged 4 0
Questions flagged⁴ 50 3,582
Questions closed 880 1,562
Question flags handled⁴ 521 3,111
Posts unlocked 19 24
Posts undeleted 53 215
Posts locked 75 645
Posts deleted⁵ 681 2,624
Posts bumped 0 108
Escalations to the CM team 11 0
Comments undeleted 407 0
Comments flagged 459 6,627
Comments deleted⁶ 22,698 9,142
Comment flags handled 5,990 1,096
Bounties canceled 7 0
Answers flagged 146 2,652
Answer flags handled 1,576 1,222
All comments on a post moved to chat 567 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Role-playing Games 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...