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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 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 Physics over the past 12 months:

Action Moderators Community¹
Users suspended² 80 77
Users destroyed³ 78 0
Users deleted 94 0
Users contacted 117 0
User banned from review 2 0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Triage queue 9 190
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue 546 8,974
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue 392 3,601
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue 70 7,477
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue 35 2,185
Tasks reviewed⁴: First questions queue 59 3,835
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue 10 8,820
Tasks reviewed⁴: First answers queue 19 1,479
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue 597 26,292
Tags merged 27 0
Tag synonyms proposed 40 1
Tag synonyms created 40 0
Questions unprotected 2 2
Questions reopened 149 106
Questions protected 31 73
Questions migrated 157 106
Questions merged 10 0
Questions flagged⁵ 138 5,261
Questions closed 4,405 6,048
Question flags handled⁵ 1,620 3,714
Posts unlocked 2 63
Posts undeleted 103 1,101
Posts locked 12 438
Posts deleted⁶ 1,485 15,983
Posts bumped 0 8,241
Escalations to the Community Manager team 9 0
Comments undeleted 871 0
Comments flagged 16 3,729
Comments deleted⁷ 14,872 15,861
Comment flags handled 3,204 543
Bounties canceled 8 0
Answers flagged 82 5,024
Answer flags handled 3,231 1,879
All comments on a post moved to chat 221 0

Footnotes

¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Physics 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 everyone a happy 2022! ^_^

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1 Answer 1

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I find this worth highlighting:

Action Moderators Community¹
Questions unprotected 2 2
Questions protected 31 73

There's a significant imbalance here, and I suspect that at least some of those ~100 protected questions only required that protection for a limited period of time (particularly when under the HNQ spotlight).

I think there's probably a case for us to systematically re-examine our existing stock of protected questions for whether they should remain that way, and (depending on the outcome) to keep this re-evaluation on a systematic ongoing basis.

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    $\begingroup$ What criteria do you have in mind for evaluating whether or not a question should stay protected? $\endgroup$
    – ACuriousMind Mod
    Jan 24, 2022 at 10:50
  • $\begingroup$ Have you checked how many of these no longer "need" (in your opinion) protection? $\endgroup$ Jan 26 at 18:33

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