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 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:

• 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!