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 Emacs breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 0 12
Users destroyed 2 0
Users contacted 1 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 68 641
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 3 8
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 12 199
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 2 331
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 25 1,268
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 38 438
Tag synonyms proposed 0 1
Questions reopened 4 0
Questions protected 0 1
Questions flagged⁴ 1 66
Questions closed 71 47
Question flags handled⁴ 21 46
Posts undeleted 0 42
Posts locked 0 6
Posts deleted⁵ 94 785
Posts bumped 0 4,553
Comments flagged 0 447
Comments deleted⁶ 181 1,077
Comment flags handled 86 361
Answers flagged 19 192
Answer flags handled 186 25
All comments on a post moved to chat 2 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Emacs 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...
