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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 Server Fault over the past 12 months:

Action Moderators Community¹
Users suspended² 2 40
Users destroyed³ 241 0
Users contacted 17 0
User banned from review 0 13
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue 557 6,044
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue 23 522
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue 628 1,674
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue 117 3,460
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue 509 13,653
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue 2,648 3,490
Tags merged 1 0
Revisions redacted 10 0
Questions reopened 25 7
Questions protected 11 109
Questions migrated 69 41
Questions flagged⁵ 27 2,260
Questions closed 3,550 772
Question flags handled⁵ 1,003 1,269
Posts unlocked 0 21
Posts undeleted 21 245
Posts locked 19 367
Posts deleted⁶ 2,437 11,847
Posts bumped 0 17,118
Escalations to the Community Manager team 1 0
Comments undeleted 6 0
Comments flagged 1 1,016
Comments deleted⁷ 1,100 4,162
Comment flags handled 860 157
Bounties canceled 2 0
Answers flagged 64 4,366
Answer flags handled 3,722 708
All comments on a post moved to chat 3 0

Footnotes

¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Server Fault 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:

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!

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