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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 Role-playing Games over the past 12 months:

Action Moderators Community¹
Users suspended² 9 23
Users destroyed³ 116 0
Users contacted 13 0
User suspensions lifted early 1 0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue 103 1,710
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue 14 1,794
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue 19 1,809
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue 19 863
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue 49 2,311
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue 24 3,681
Tags merged 12 0
Tag synonyms proposed 61 0
Tag synonyms created 70 0
Revisions redacted 14 0
Questions unprotected 33 782
Questions reopened 102 289
Questions protected 9 121
Questions migrated 4 4
Questions merged 4 0
Questions flagged⁵ 23 657
Questions closed 291 1,146
Question flags handled⁵ 346 335
Posts unlocked 4 4
Posts undeleted 38 181
Posts locked 30 161
Posts deleted⁶ 474 1,919
Posts bumped 0 95
Escalations to the Community Manager team 1 0
Comments undeleted 362 0
Comments flagged 59 4,973
Comments deleted⁷ 16,275 7,217
Comment flags handled 4,624 402
Bounties canceled 3 0
Answers flagged 101 1,984
Answer flags handled 978 1,107
All comments on a post moved to chat 257 0

Footnotes

¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Role-playing Games 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:

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!

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Thanks for posting these! :) \$\endgroup\$
    – V2Blast
    Jan 20, 2021 at 0:07
  • \$\begingroup\$ I have been looking forward to this post, awesome :) \$\endgroup\$ Jan 21, 2021 at 15:25
  • \$\begingroup\$ Is it possible to get stats on duplicate closures that were hammered vs. got all 5 votes? \$\endgroup\$ Jan 21, 2021 at 15:32
  • \$\begingroup\$ That should be query-able on SEDE, I'd expect? \$\endgroup\$
    – JNat StaffMod
    Jan 21, 2021 at 16:18
  • \$\begingroup\$ @ThomasMarkov This query gives 346 gold badge closed dupes. That's not counting deleted Qs and does include some dupes closed by mods (in the cases where our gold badge is applicable). \$\endgroup\$
    – Someone_Evil Mod
    Jan 21, 2021 at 17:03

1 Answer 1

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2019 vs 2020 comparison for RPG.se

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Meta posts:

2017 stats

2018 stats

2019 stats

SEDE Queries:

Total number of questions, answers per year

Comments per year

Also:

Fun site with more SE site statistics.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Wow. That question-and-answer traffic dropoff is beefy. Do you know if that's just here or if that's consistent across the SE network? \$\endgroup\$ Jan 22, 2021 at 16:31
  • 2
    \$\begingroup\$ @HeyICanChan IIRC activity went generally down for much of the year, with the exception of certain stacks which saw a big increase (think that was an SO blog post?). Shouldn't be too hard to scrape together data from MSE closing roundup (covers the network, 2020's here). We saw a drop in activity (As, Qs, views) starting in march, no points for guessing the culprit. \$\endgroup\$
    – Someone_Evil Mod
    Jan 22, 2021 at 19:28
  • \$\begingroup\$ Apparently that blog post was late april, so not sure how well those patterns held. \$\endgroup\$
    – Someone_Evil Mod
    Jan 22, 2021 at 19:33
  • \$\begingroup\$ Checking site analytics it appears there was a slight rebound through August and then numbers start droopping consistently throughout Fall and into Winter. \$\endgroup\$ Jan 22, 2021 at 19:35
  • \$\begingroup\$ Still have this spreadsheet saved away somewhere? \$\endgroup\$
    – Oblivious Sage Mod
    Jan 12, 2022 at 15:12
  • \$\begingroup\$ @ObliviousSage Apparently I didnt save last year's but I've got the 2019 one, I'm already working on the one for this year. \$\endgroup\$ Jan 12, 2022 at 15:13
  • \$\begingroup\$ Awesome! Give us a shout if there's anything the mod team can do to help. \$\endgroup\$
    – Oblivious Sage Mod
    Jan 12, 2022 at 15:15

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