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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 Mathematics Educators breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:

                 Action                  Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended²                                  0          9
Users destroyed                                   2          0
Users deleted                                     1          0
Users contacted                                   3          0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue             2        108
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue                0         33
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue          0        100
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue                1         50
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue                 0        322
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue                0        347
Tags merged                                       1          0
Questions reopened                                0          1
Questions protected                               1          4
Questions flagged⁴                                0         86
Questions closed                                  8        111
Question flags handled⁴                          47         39
Posts undeleted                                   2          9
Posts locked                                      0          4
Posts deleted⁵                                   58        133
Posts bumped                                      0         19
Comments undeleted                               16          0
Comments flagged                                 22        225
Comments deleted⁶                               414        411
Comment flags handled                           224         23
Answers flagged                                   3        138
Answer flags handled                            122         19
All comments on a post moved to chat              6          0

Footnotes

¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Mathematics Educators 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...

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Thank you to all the users that help to moderate the site. The site is still small but it is nevertheless very useful to have numerous users raise flags when there is a need for a moderator to have a look.

Speaking of the site's size, while its growth is not explosive, the influx of new content is steady and there is even a slight upwards trend.

Thus, we can be optimistic for the future and I wish everybody a Happy New Year!

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    $\begingroup$ Thanks, quid $\diamond$, for your continued work on behalf of this site and SE more generally! $\endgroup$ – Benjamin Dickman Jan 3 '19 at 5:19
  • $\begingroup$ I just read this post. Shocked you've only needed to destroy 2 users. We (at Money.SE) get a steady flow of spam posts, and tend towards destroying those profiles. In 2018, 311, almost 1 per day. $\endgroup$ – JTP - Apologise to Monica Mar 25 '19 at 2:04
  • $\begingroup$ @JoeTaxpayer I assume it's the combination of the site being small and the subject not being as likely as to attract spammers. That said, there should have been more than that number of spammers. Maybe we should also destroy more systematically. Although thinking of it, blatant spam seems rare. $\endgroup$ – quid♦ Mar 26 '19 at 19:34

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