2020: a year in moderation

Question

As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the past 12 months.

As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:

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

That doesn't eliminate the need for having moderators altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.

So as we welcome 2021, and in keeping with tradition, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some exciting stats. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on History over the past 12 months:

Action	Moderators	Community¹
Users suspended²	13	24
Users destroyed³	41	0
Users deleted	8	0
Users contacted	50	0
User banned from review	3	0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue	415	828
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue	183	538
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue	161	344
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue	154	226
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue	137	1,350
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue	191	3,228
Tags merged	14	0
Tag synonyms proposed	7	0
Tag synonyms created	9	0
Questions reopened	18	24
Questions protected	29	87
Questions migrated	28	0
Questions merged	1	0
Questions flagged⁵	29	443
Questions closed	484	437
Question flags handled⁵	360	112
Posts unlocked	3	21
Posts undeleted	14	59
Posts locked	21	95
Posts deleted⁶	483	1,289
Posts bumped	0	53
Escalations to the Community Manager team	3	0
Comments undeleted	39	0
Comments flagged	197	999
Comments deleted⁷	2,654	2,000
Comment flags handled	1,128	68
Answers flagged	32	1,034
Answer flags handled	924	142
All comments on a post moved to chat	58	0

Footnotes

¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of History 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 A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.

⁴ 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.

⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).

⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.

⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).

Further reading:

• Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: 2019: a year in moderation

• You can also check out this report on other sites

• Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites

A big thank you to Shog9 for writing the queries and script to facilitate fetching and posting this data to all the sites in the network, and to Brian for the subsequent work making the whole thing more user friendly.

Wishing everyone a happy 2021!

Answer 1

Interesting how we are way down on users destroyed/deleted this year. I would not have expected that.

FWIW, I don't keep perfect track of this, but I believe the vast majority of "users" destroyed or deleted this past year were actually all the same user. Same as last year. Outgoing mod SempaiScuba showed this pretty conclusively. So the person last year who remarked "that's a lot of Nazis", was a bit off. It was mostly just one Nazi.

Of course with Nazis, a little can go a surprisingly long way.