2023: a year in moderation

Question

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 Meta Stack Exchange over the past 12 months:

Action	Moderators	Community User¹	Community²
All comments on a post moved to chat	9	0	0
Answer flags handled	1,422	1,648	0
Answers flagged	251	270	2,544
Bounties canceled	1	0	0
Comment flags handled	3,367	687	49
Comments deleted⁸	5,558	86	2,939
Comments flagged	862	42	3,201
Comments undeleted	126	0	0
Escalations to the Community Manager team	18	0	0
Posts bumped	0	28	0
Posts deleted⁷	1,931	3,120	1,089
Posts locked	43	2,084	0
Posts undeleted	125	1	147
Posts unlocked	9	18	0
Question flags handled⁶	3,125	9,233	0
Questions closed	1,626	1,684	91
Questions flagged⁶	672	260	11,429
Questions merged	5	0	0
Questions migrated	44	0	0
Questions protected	3	86	25
Questions reopened	44	52	11
Questions unprotected	3	0	5
Revisions redacted	206	0	0
Tag highlight language set	2	0	0
Tag synonyms created	22	0	0
Tag synonyms proposed	14	0	2
Tags merged	10	0	0
Tasks reviewed⁵: "Close votes" queue	135	0	3,106
Tasks reviewed⁵: "First answers" queue	0	0	0
Tasks reviewed⁵: "First questions" queue	0	0	0
Tasks reviewed⁵: "Late answers" queue	0	0	0
Tasks reviewed⁵: "Low quality posts" queue	54	0	859
Tasks reviewed⁵: "Reopen votes" queue	31	0	618
Tasks reviewed⁵: "Suggested edits" queue	63	105	1,225
Tasks reviewed⁵: "Triage" queue	0	0	0
User banned from review	1	0	0
User review-bans lifted early	0	0	0
User suspensions lifted early	2	0	0
Users contacted	163	0	0
Users deleted	7	0	0
Users destroyed⁴	428	0	0
Users suspended³	124	577	0

Footnotes

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

² This refers to the membership of Meta Stack Exchange 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:

• Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: 2022: 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 2024! ^_^

Answer 1

Rows for "questions closed" and "questions reopened" are incorrect/misleading

Shortly after these posts were published on all sites, there was some confusion as to why the Community user is shown as having reopened many questions, generally more than what the community reopened. The Community user cannot itself reopen questions - the only case where it would be shown as a reopen voter is if a user who's cast a pending vote to reopen later has their account removed.

Eventually, after some sleuthing, we discovered that the columns for that row are based on the (individual) user listed in the history event in each question. When more than one user is involved in reopening a question and a moderator isn't involved, the system will list the Community user in the history event. Based on fairly obvious conjecture (the community most definitely closed more than 91 questions here on this site, what with the large amount of blatantly off-topic posts coming in daily), it appears the same is true for the closed questions row. This means that:

• The "Moderators" column shows questions where a moderator closed or reopened. (This is the only column that is correct.)
• The "Community user" column shows questions where the community closed or reopened without any type of binding vote, questions where a gold-badge user bindingly closed or reopened and other users had also cast votes, and (for the closed questions row only) where the Community user actually cast a binding vote in response to the author approving a proposed duplicate.
• The "Community" column shows questions where a gold-badge user bindingly closed or reopened the question without anyone else voting.

The latter two columns, as you can see, don't conform to the actual definitions. In particular, the way it should be like is as follows:

• The "Community user" column in the closed questions row should only list cases where the author approved a pending duplicate vote or flag. For the reopen questions row, it should be zero since the bot cannot reopen questions.

• The "Community" column should list all closures and reopenings done without binding votes or with binding votes from gold-badge users.

Can these fixes be deployed on all sites?