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:
Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? I posted a similar report here last year: 2018: 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 you all a happy new year...
