2021: a year in moderation

Question

As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year.

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 say goodbye to 2021, 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 The Workplace over the past 12 months:

Action	Moderators	Community¹
Users suspended²	30	36
Users destroyed³	2,303	0
Users deleted	10	0
Users contacted	49	0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue	268	953
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue	93	437
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue	9	205
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue	5	55
Tasks reviewed⁴: First questions queue	15	139
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue	398	727
Tasks reviewed⁴: First answers queue	28	109
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue	616	1,709
Tags merged	1	0
Tag synonyms proposed	4	0
Tag synonyms created	4	0
Revisions redacted	4	0
Questions unprotected	0	1
Questions reopened	15	11
Questions protected	59	19
Questions migrated	6	1
Questions merged	1	0
Questions flagged⁵	53	960
Questions closed	147	646
Question flags handled⁵	632	377
Posts unlocked	5	47
Posts undeleted	12	68
Posts locked	55	73
Posts deleted⁶	202	1,051
Posts bumped	0	12
Escalations to the Community Manager team	4	0
Comments undeleted	68	0
Comments flagged	502	3,876
Comments deleted⁷	9,144	4,246
Comment flags handled	4,152	246
Answers flagged	24	675
Answer flags handled	563	137
All comments on a post moved to chat	282	0

Footnotes

¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of The Workplace 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? We posted a similar report here last year: 2020: 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 everyone a happy 2022! ^_^

Answer 1

Thanks JNat for the information and post. I'm writing this answer to give a bit of explanation regarding the unusually high stat for "Users destroyed" this past year.

---

As suggested by JNat's foot-note (3) on that point, yes this translates mostly to SPAM account deletions.

Late 2020 we noticed a trend among SPAM users/posts on TWP (more like a modus operandi than a trend). It basically consisted in SPAM accounts being systematically created each day, those accounts stayed "dormant" for days or weeks (or more?), with no activity whatsoever, and then some time later "wake up" and proceed to post SPAM until blocked or nuked.

This "trend" was also perceivable by the increase in activity in our Smoke Detector. After being aware of that we began to systematically destroy or handle those completely evident SPAM accounts. About May 2021 a big batch of such accounts was found and handled. And that's why that stat is so high.

Regarding the "campaign" on monitoring the creation of SPAM accounts and destroying them... well, let's say it just doesn't scale well :). The consensus and advice given by the Community Team and some discussion, broadly speaking, was that it was suggested to block/suspend those users instead, so further investigation can be taken and so we can analyze and be aware of the pattern.

Personally, if I see sporadic user(s) like these I will not doubt to nuke them... but going on a campaign again is quite time-consuming and may hamper any effort to catch trends/IPs if this wave happens again.

Fortunately, as of the writing of this post, this situation has stabilized. SPAM accounts will continue to be handled as they should. The Community should keep flagging and handling things as we've been doing. Our Smoke Detector is working quite well and actually improved a lot by the training given by this SPAM wave.