What do moderators do here?

Question

There's an election going on right now, and as a result there's rather a lot of discussion about the role that moderators play on this site.

...actually, that conversation has been going on for quite a while.

One of the hardest problems that faces those hardy souls who step up to nominate themselves in an election is the question of what they hope to accomplish. An awful lot of what moderators do on a day-to-day basis is not terribly visible; I've seen a lot of moderators compare themselves to janitors: you only tend to notice them when a mess doesn't get cleaned up promptly. As a result, many candidates go into the election process without a clear idea of what to expect should they emerge on the other side with a diamond next to their name...

At the start of the year, I posted a list of moderator actions for 2016 on Stack Overflow, with the goal of making the work handled by moderators - diamond or otherwise - a bit more transparent.

Let's get some of that information visible here too, shall we?

Answer 1

As requested by myself, here's a birds-eye view into what actually happened on Role-playing Games Stack Exchange moderation-wise over the past 365 days, for your collective edification and bemusement:

Action                                  Moderators Community¹ 
--------------------------------------- ---------- --------- 
Users suspended²                              23          8  
Users destroyed                               81          0  
Users deleted                                 20          0  
Users contacted                               40          0  
User suspensions lifted early                  1          0  
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue         68       2082  
Tasks reviewed: Reopen Vote queue             56       2071  
Tasks reviewed: Low Quality Posts queue       10       1212  
Tasks reviewed: Late Answer queue              7        751  
Tasks reviewed: First Post queue              24       2662  
Tasks reviewed: Close Votes queue             87       3788  
Tags merged                                   21          0  
Tag synonyms proposed                         17          2  
Tag synonyms created                          21          0  
Revisions redacted                             1          0  
Questions unprotected                          2          5  
Questions reopened                           269        166  
Questions protected                           27         72  
Questions migrated                             5          1  
Questions merged                               5          0  
Questions flagged⁴                             9        766  
Questions closed                             735        980  
Question flags handled                       356        419  
Posts unlocked                                16          9  
Posts undeleted                               45        125  
Posts locked                                 104         83  
Posts deleted⁵                               683       1551  
Posts bumped                                   0        143  
Escalations to the CM team                     6          0  
Comments undeleted                           193          0  
Comments flagged                             683       1841  
Comments deleted⁶                          15644       5200  
Comment flags handled                       2386        138  
Bounties canceled                              3          0  
Answers flagged                               41       1658  
Answer flags handled                        1145        554  
All comments on a post moved to chat         183          0  

Footnotes

¹ "Community" here refers both to the vast membership of RPG without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise affectionately referred to 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 a good chunk of 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).