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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 Ask Ubuntu over the past 12 months:

Action Moderators Community¹
Users suspended² 16 50
Users destroyed³ 278 0
Users deleted 12 0
Users contacted 81 0
User review-bans lifted early 1 0
User banned from review 4 23
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue 415 23,614
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue 48 2,780
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue 165 17,917
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue 212 11,850
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue 198 37,705
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue 156 15,885
Tags merged 5 0
Tag synonyms proposed 6 1
Tag synonyms created 9 0
Revisions redacted 2 0
Questions unprotected 12 38
Questions reopened 131 130
Questions protected 70 612
Questions migrated 56 18
Questions merged 25 0
Questions flagged⁵ 237 16,358
Questions closed 1,080 10,145
Question flags handled⁵ 2,052 14,546
Posts unlocked 13 10
Posts undeleted 212 770
Posts locked 32 2,617
Posts deleted⁶ 7,805 28,881
Posts bumped 0 8,559
Escalations to the Community Manager team 5 0
Comments undeleted 120 0
Comments flagged 159 3,883
Comments deleted⁷ 8,674 21,222
Comment flags handled 3,226 818
Bounties canceled 2 0
Answers flagged 482 16,970
Answer flags handled 13,282 4,192
All comments on a post moved to chat 108 0

Footnotes

¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Ask Ubuntu 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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  • Wait. 278 Moderators' account destroyed?
    – Hemil
    Jan 24, 2021 at 9:22
  • 1
    @Hemil Moderators destroyed 278 user accounts.
    – Kulfy
    Jan 24, 2021 at 12:10
  • @Kulfy makes sense now. I was like SO is boasting it deleted accounts of 278 moderators. Are they nuts?
    – Hemil
    Jan 24, 2021 at 13:42
  • @Hemil Well these statistics are for Ask Ubuntu. For Stack Overflow, see this corresponding post on Stack Overflow. Also, on Stack Overflow, 4,653 were destroyed by moderators and 5,434 were deleted.
    – Kulfy
    Jan 24, 2021 at 13:51
  • Sorry. I meant ask ubuntu. Not SO. I forget they are different sites
    – Hemil
    Jan 24, 2021 at 14:00

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