The latest blog post has a graph of raised flags:
You'd expect it to be relatively "smooth" but there's a drop of about 3,000 flags in September 2012 compared to August 2012, and then right after it goes up by 7,000 flags in October. What happened?
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Perhaps people were too busy preparing for armageddon? Besides, why not ask why were flags up from September to October?. – BDM Mar 9 '13 at 7:28
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I wondered that too when I saw it... The only thing that comes to mind was that the new review badges were introduced in September, but it seems to me like that would have caused a bump, not a drop? – animuson♦ Mar 9 '13 at 7:31
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Perhaps there was some maintenance run on the server or other software bug that caused September's votes to be counted in October which would explain both irregularities. – BinaryTox1n Mar 9 '13 at 7:37
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1August through December '12 is the time when new review system has been deployed, settled and widely experimented with, I would look for correlations with that. As an example, in November I've been raising helpful flags from Late Answers queue at a crazy rate about 50/day, that never been the case to me before and after that – gnat Mar 9 '13 at 8:04
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1Looking through my own flagging history, there was indeed a drop in my own flagging pattern (from around 11 pages in August to only around 4 pages of flags in September). Can't remember what the cause was, but most probably because I dislike the interface of review queue since it slows down my flagging speed. (I stopped flagging in November, and resume flagging in December when I got 10k). – nhahtdh Mar 9 '13 at 8:58
Personally, I don't think that the drop is anything but an outlier. On this graph, it looks like a rather major drop -- till you notice that the graph is truncated. It's an ~8% drop, nothing big.
The rise after that, however, probably can be explained by the introduction of the new review queue.
answered Mar 9 '13 at 8:16
