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It’s that time of the year again! As we wave goodbye to last year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year.

As most of you here might be 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 — folks like you. 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 in ensuring Stack Exchange sites remain a valuable source of high-quality content on the web.

So as we say goodbye to 2023 (and January 2024… ahem) and move into 2024, 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 Community User¹ Community²
All comments on a post moved to chat 24 0 0
Answer flags handled 242 242 0
Answers flagged 1 77 399
Bounties canceled 0 0 0
Comment flags handled 255 32 0
Comments deleted⁸ 881 27 903
Comments flagged 4 2 277
Comments undeleted 18 0 0
Escalations to the Community Manager team 1 0 0
Posts bumped 0 44 0
Posts deleted⁷ 114 494 187
Posts locked 2 35 0
Posts undeleted 3 0 21
Posts unlocked 0 3 0
Question flags handled⁶ 124 190 1
Questions closed 59 370 0
Questions flagged⁶ 0 27 326
Questions merged 0 0 0
Questions migrated 7 0 0
Questions protected 8 15 7
Questions reopened 6 26 0
Questions unprotected 0 0 0
Revisions redacted 0 0 0
Tag highlight language set 0 0 0
Tag synonyms created 0 0 0
Tag synonyms proposed 0 0 0
Tags merged 0 0 0
Tasks reviewed⁵: "Close votes" queue 14 0 1,515
Tasks reviewed⁵: "First answers" queue 1 0 516
Tasks reviewed⁵: "First questions" queue 0 0 656
Tasks reviewed⁵: "Late answers" queue 2 0 235
Tasks reviewed⁵: "Low quality posts" queue 1 0 283
Tasks reviewed⁵: "Reopen votes" queue 0 0 297
Tasks reviewed⁵: "Suggested edits" queue 5 41 416
Tasks reviewed⁵: "Triage" queue 0 0 0
User banned from review 0 0 0
User review-bans lifted early 0 0 0
User suspensions lifted early 2 0 0
Users contacted 21 0 0
Users deleted 1 0 0
Users destroyed⁴ 66 0 0
Users suspended³ 12 82 0

Footnotes

¹ This refers to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.

² This refers to the membership of History without diamonds next to their names.

³ 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.

⁴ 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.

⁵ 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.

⁶ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes). The community² can handle these flags by at least one person voting to close a question that has a close flag.

⁷ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.

⁸ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).

Further reading:

Wishing everyone a happy 2024! ^_^

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Interesting things I'm noticing, by comparing this to previous years:

  1. The number of users suspended by moderators the last 3 years has not budged, but the amount suspended by the "Community" has doubled each of the last 2 years. I'm not sure what exactly that means, but geometric growth in a problem area seems a very bad trend.

  2. Pretty big jump in the number of users destroyed (read: "Nazis punched") this year over the last 2. Like half again as many. Some of that may be accounted for by the AI "Z" spammer we had earlier this year, on top of our regular Nazi trolls. Some may also be accounted for by our mod team getting a bit more proactive about Troll destruction this year. We don't always wait for a Troll sock to publicly Troll before destroying them anymore.1

1- Of course Trolls will still Troll, so keep flagging them!

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