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It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...

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 Role-playing Games over the past 12 months:

                  Action                  Moderators Community¹
----------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended²                                  14         25
Users destroyed³                                 165          0
Users deleted                                      1          0
Users contacted                                   29          0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue             66      2,253
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue                13      3,261
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue          13      2,376
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue                 9      1,095
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue                 23      3,401
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue                34      5,486
Tags merged                                       24          0
Tag synonyms proposed                             86          9
Tag synonyms created                              64          2
Revisions redacted                                 1          0
Questions unprotected                             27          4
Questions reopened                               234        449
Questions protected                               41        182
Questions migrated                                 6          5
Questions merged                                   5          0
Questions flagged⁵                                 8        935
Questions closed                                 469      1,607
Question flags handled⁵                          396        546
Posts unlocked                                     6         14
Posts undeleted                                   52        260
Posts locked                                      37        202
Posts deleted⁶                                   509      2,460
Posts bumped                                       0        100
Escalations to the Community Manager team         11          0
Comments undeleted                               655          0
Comments flagged                                 177      7,534
Comments deleted⁷                             20,276     12,204
Comment flags handled                          6,312      1,399
Bounties canceled                                  1          0
Answers flagged                                  102      2,921
Answer flags handled                           1,335      1,688
All comments on a post moved to chat             477          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:

Wishing you all a happy new year...

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    \$\begingroup\$ While this is already useful information, like last year, I think this information becomes more useful if answers compare these stats with the stats of similar stacks. (Also see my comments on last year's information here.) \$\endgroup\$ Jan 1, 2020 at 14:27
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    \$\begingroup\$ Sounds like a good opportunity to poke Rubiks... \$\endgroup\$
    – Shog9
    Jan 1, 2020 at 16:27
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    \$\begingroup\$ @HeyICanChan I'm working on a year to year comparison right now. Is there any data you are specifically interested in seeing compared to the other sites? \$\endgroup\$ Jan 1, 2020 at 21:25
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Rubiksmoose What you did last year was more than acceptable. :-) \$\endgroup\$ Jan 1, 2020 at 21:45
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    \$\begingroup\$ Related: 2019: a year in closing \$\endgroup\$ Jan 3, 2020 at 16:20
  • \$\begingroup\$ Do we know the unique number of community members contributing to moderation? \$\endgroup\$
    – Akixkisu
    Jan 7, 2020 at 10:57

1 Answer 1

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2018 vs 2019 comparison for RPG.se

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Meta posts:

2017 stats

2018 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\$ Just throwing the raw numbers out there for now. May do some armchair analysis/observations later. \$\endgroup\$ Jan 1, 2020 at 21:37
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    \$\begingroup\$ @MikeQ As far as I know, 2018 was the first time Shog gave us this data and much of it is stuff that can only be internally queried. Otherwise, I'd love to! \$\endgroup\$ Jan 1, 2020 at 23:18
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Rubiksmoose Not well labeled, but it's here: rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7022/52137 \$\endgroup\$
    – Someone_Evil Mod
    Jan 1, 2020 at 23:19
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Someone_Evil Added! If anybody has an suggestion for how best to summarize/visualize the change over all three years I'm open to suggestions. \$\endgroup\$ Jan 1, 2020 at 23:52
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    \$\begingroup\$ If anyone's curious about the unprotecting of questions, I'll raise my hand: I can't think of the last time I came across a protected question that's more than a week old and didn't unprotect it. \$\endgroup\$
    – nitsua60 Mod
    Jan 2, 2020 at 3:47
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    \$\begingroup\$ @nitsua60 as I understand it, that's exactly what we should be doing according to the CMs. So...nice work! I think I've only ever unprotected a handful. \$\endgroup\$ Jan 2, 2020 at 4:25
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    \$\begingroup\$ Hey, why we are undeleting comments more this year than previous year? It's interesting! \$\endgroup\$
    – Vylix
    Jan 2, 2020 at 9:53
  • \$\begingroup\$ I think perhaps getting these along some more general stats for site activity (total questions, comments, and answers posted, number of new users) would be useful. Without that, this isn't saying much about the general level of moderation, only how much of the activity is done by diamonds and how much is community. \$\endgroup\$
    – Someone_Evil Mod
    Jan 2, 2020 at 10:07
  • \$\begingroup\$ "Tag synonyms proposed" for mods... I feel like a lot of that's me :P Also, I wonder how much of the change in activities by mods is because of the substantial change in the mod team... BTW, it looks like the "posts bumped" row is blacked out for both the mod and community portions of the table even though the community portion is not blank. Might want to fix that. \$\endgroup\$
    – V2Blast StaffMod
    Jan 2, 2020 at 10:31
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    \$\begingroup\$ @nitsua60 Wait. Folks who can are supposed to unprotect protected questions after a certain point? What point? Or should a new question be posed about that? (I just stumbled on a 2-year-old protected question that I can unprotect, for instance. Do I unprotect it just 'cause I can?) \$\endgroup\$ Jan 2, 2020 at 14:47
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    \$\begingroup\$ @HeyICanChan I don't know about supposed to unprotect, but I certainly do when it doesn't seem there's an ongoing need for the protection. (It's a habit I started when I got the unprotect-vote privilege.) The usual case (IME) is some three year-old question that had hit the HNQ, gotten a poor answer, been protected, then settled down; now some tag-edit or similarly minor thing surfaced it and the protection seems no longer needed. A meta on the subject might be useful, though I think this covers a lot of it. \$\endgroup\$
    – nitsua60 Mod
    Jan 2, 2020 at 18:29
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    \$\begingroup\$ @HeyICanChan In addition to what nitsua said, this MSE question has guidance and links to further discussion on the purpose and use for the tool. Basically though, as soon as the protection is no longer explicitly needed, it should be removed it seems. \$\endgroup\$ Jan 2, 2020 at 22:24

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