2022: 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 preceding calendar year.

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 say goodbye to 2022 (and where did January go, right?) and dive head first into 2023, 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
All comments on a post moved to chat	27	0
Answer flags handled	278	217
Answers flagged	0	495
Comment flags handled	264	67
Comments deleted⁷	1,020	1,033
Comments flagged	7	324
Comments undeleted	13	0
Escalations to the Community Manager team	1	0
Posts bumped	0	39
Posts deleted⁶	153	711
Posts locked	1	28
Posts undeleted	7	21
Posts unlocked	0	2
Question flags handled⁵	140	245
Questions closed	65	441
Questions flagged⁵	5	418
Questions migrated	3	1
Questions protected	5	28
Questions reopened	5	26
Tasks reviewed⁴: "Close votes" queue	6	2,087
Tasks reviewed⁴: "First answers" queue	1	546
Tasks reviewed⁴: "First questions" queue	1	725
Tasks reviewed⁴: "Late answers" queue	0	261
Tasks reviewed⁴: "Low quality posts" queue	1	384
Tasks reviewed⁴: "Reopen votes" queue	0	397
Tasks reviewed⁴: "Suggested edits" queue	0	459
Users contacted	33	0
Users deleted	4	0
Users destroyed³	49	0
Users suspended²	15	39

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). Community can handle these flags by at least one person voting to close a question that has a close flag.

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: 2021: 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

Wishing everyone a happy 2023! ^_^

Answer 1

Interesting things I noticed here:

• 3/4 of undeleted posts were by users. I'm guessing that was mostly users undeleting their own posts, otherwise that seems like a lot.
• Given that most "destroyed" accounts are Moderators mulching Nazis socks (and most of those the same Nazi), that's nearly once a week we got a Nazi sock visit. Its also almost identical to last year's number. I guess the Nazis are in a groove, and so are we.