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Since the start of the new year, I've been posting questions on various sites detailing how the various moderation actions taken on these sites break down between Moderators and ordinary members of the site. As Federico and S. Carnahan have requested the same information for this site, I will provide it here also!

A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:

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

While there certainly are Moderators here, a significant amount of the moderation is done by ordinary people, using the privileges they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.

As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together. And what could be more festive than a big pile of numbers? So here is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on MathOverflow over the past 12 months:

                  Action                  Moderators Community¹
----------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended²                                   6         52
Users destroyed³                                 130          0
Users deleted                                    154          0
Users contacted                                   17          0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue              3      4,043
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue                 0      1,085
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue           0      1,475
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue                 0        513
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue                  0      5,199
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue                 2     11,991
Tags merged                                       14          0
Tag synonyms proposed                              7          1
Tag synonyms created                               9          0
Questions unprotected                              0          1
Questions reopened                                11         21
Questions protected                                1         30
Questions migrated                                14        117
Questions merged                                   2          0
Questions flagged⁵                                 4      5,467
Questions closed                                 103      3,041
Question flags handled⁵                          735      4,738
Posts unlocked                                     2         49
Posts undeleted                                   21        690
Posts locked                                       2        497
Posts deleted⁶                                   321      7,788
Posts bumped                                       0      1,072
Escalations to the Community Manager team          3          0
Comments undeleted                                19          0
Comments flagged                                   0      3,321
Comments deleted⁷                                933     11,704
Comment flags handled                            540      2,782
Bounties canceled                                  1          0
Answers flagged                                    7      1,825
Answer flags handled                             801      1,031
All comments on a post moved to chat               6          0

Footnotes

¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of MathOverflow 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:

Wishing you all a happy new year...

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  • 4
    $\begingroup$ Thank you for this. $\endgroup$
    – JRN
    Jan 8, 2020 at 4:22
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Thanks @Shog9! Technical question: how are multiplicities counted here? For instance, if the same question gets closed, flagged or merged twice, or the same user suspended twice, is it counted as 2 separate events or 1? $\endgroup$ Jan 8, 2020 at 13:16
  • $\begingroup$ 2, @federico - counts actions $\endgroup$
    – Shog9
    Jan 8, 2020 at 20:52
  • 5
    $\begingroup$ Interesting. Questions closed ~ 3000, questions re-opened ~ 30. About 1 percent. And: posts deleted ~ 8000, post undeleted ~ 700. About 9 percent. $\endgroup$ Jan 9, 2020 at 14:31
  • 4
    $\begingroup$ @GeraldEdgar A sizable number of posts undeleted might be by the OP who first deleted because something was wrong, then fixed the problem, then undeleted. This tends to happen much less for questions. $\endgroup$
    – Todd Trimble Mod
    Jan 11, 2020 at 2:55
  • 3
    $\begingroup$ @Todd's guess is pretty plausible; looking at the breakdown of deletion reasons over on SO, authors are the biggest single group of deletionists - that's likely true here as well. $\endgroup$
    – Shog9
    Jan 11, 2020 at 3:11
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    $\begingroup$ @Shog9 I'm very sad to see you're no longer with SE, Shog9. Best wishes for your future. $\endgroup$
    – Todd Trimble Mod
    Jan 14, 2020 at 15:12

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