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 Meta Stack Exchange over the past 12 months:

Action	Moderators	Community¹
Users suspended²	115	216
Users destroyed³	1,510	0
Users deleted	23	0
Users contacted	156	1
User suspensions lifted early	2	0
User review-bans lifted early	2	0
User banned from review	3	0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue	33	2,149
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue	11	2,232
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue	10	1,252
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue	11	6,061
Tags merged	6	0
Tag synonyms proposed	4	7
Tag synonyms created	10	1
Revisions redacted	11	0
Questions unprotected	5	24
Questions reopened	51	135
Questions protected	2	125
Questions migrated	59	0
Questions merged	1	0
Questions flagged⁵	409	18,804
Questions closed	1,903	4,344
Question flags handled⁵	3,407	15,799
Posts unlocked	14	28
Posts undeleted	53	241
Posts locked	57	2,010
Posts deleted⁶	2,823	6,792
Posts bumped	0	67
Escalations to the Community Manager team	9	0
Comments undeleted	110	0
Comments flagged	37	4,362
Comments deleted⁷	7,284	5,668
Comment flags handled	3,356	1,053
Bounties canceled	4	0
Answers flagged	180	3,415
Answer flags handled	1,555	2,055
All comments on a post moved to chat	28	0

Footnotes

¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Meta Stack Exchange 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!

Answer 1

As this site is the network meta, a large portion of the moderator actions here aren't performed by local moderators, but by Stack Exchange employees exercising their staff moderator privileges. In fact, between April 2014 and November 2018, this site had no moderators, with the only moderators being SE staff.

I'm curious to know the proportion today of moderator actions which are performed by local moderators, as opposed to SE employees.

When it comes to the moderator-performed actions in the table, can we please get a breakdown of the number of actions performed by local moderators, and the number of actions performed by Stack Exchange staff? In other words, I'd like to see the "Moderators" column broken down into "Local moderators" and "SE staff".