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 Ask Patents breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 0 5
Users destroyed 19 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 3 92
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 0 8
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 1 58
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 0 66
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 17 286
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 0 69
Revisions redacted 2 0
Questions unprotected 1 0
Questions reopened 2 0
Questions protected 0 5
Questions migrated 1 0
Questions flagged⁴ 14 208
Questions closed 104 3
Question flags handled⁴ 121 101
Posts undeleted 0 1
Posts locked 0 40
Posts deleted⁵ 40 173
Posts bumped 0 1,030
Comments flagged 25 205
Comments deleted⁶ 46 245
Comment flags handled 43 187
Answers flagged 26 222
Answer flags handled 179 69
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Ask Patents 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...
