Good morning, all! I'm a Community Manager here at Stack Exchange; some of you might remember me from classic answers such as a temporary change now approaching 6 years live and a list of possibly meaningless numbers.
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 there is some indication that this would be well-received, I will now attempt to provide the same information sorts of information here...
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
A large amount of the moderation performed here 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. To that end, here is how the moderation done here on MathOverflow breaks down by activity over the course of 2018:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 21 38
Users destroyed⁷ 104 0
Users deleted 8 0
Users contacted 35 0
User suspensions lifted early 1 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 5 4,339
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 1 1,191
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 0 1,450
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 0 515
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 2 5,365
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 0 10,233
Tags merged 7 0
Tag synonyms proposed 4 1
Tag synonyms created 3 0
Questions reopened 14 47
Questions protected 1 21
Questions migrated 30 143
Questions flagged⁴ 8 6,518
Questions closed 166 2,946
Question flags handled⁴ 856 5,670
Posts unlocked 0 55
Posts undeleted 56 874
Posts locked 3 456
Posts deleted⁵ 383 7,375
Posts bumped 0 2,034
Escalations to the CM team 10 0
Comments undeleted 35 0
Comments flagged 0 4,557
Comments deleted⁶ 1,667 12,697
Comment flags handled 1,385 3,172
Answers flagged 0 1,470
Answer flags handled 830 640
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 This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 3 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 3, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁴ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁵ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁶ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
⁷ A "destroyed" user is a profile that was deleted along with all of its questions, answers and comments. Generally used to handle spam or abuse.
Wishing you all a happy new year...
