How do you get full time moderators for your forums?

by Dayne Dylan Banned

Posted: 13 years ago 10 replies

INTERNET MARKETING

Warriors, I've just started an upcoming social network in a niche and I want to make sure that it gets well moderated for spam or bad pictures, etc. etc.

Do any of you ever hire this out for cheap to someone? Any advice?

#forums #full #moderators #time

Daniel44 13 years ago

I tend to just message some of my more upstanding members of the community. I manage it for a few months on my own, then ask some of my members and usually find they will do it for free/cheap, and love the community more than any outsourced person would.
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Eko Ventures 13 years ago

Hey Dayne,

It really depends on the size of your community, how quickly it's growing, and how urgently you need moderation.

Being a community manager of an MMO with a user base of over 900,000 - I can tell you having good moderators is one of the most important things to maintaining the sanity of your forum. Ideally you want to find your moderators within your existing community, people who stand out, people who are genuinely interested in both what you're forum is about and it's growth.

If however all you're looking for is pure quality control - this can be safely outsourced. Personally though I like my moderators to be community leaders .
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donnan 13 years ago

Hey Dayne,

Why don't you do what they do here. Make the members the moderators.

I believe the way it works here is, if so many members reading a post find it offensive or spam they click the "Report Post" button. If enough members have pressed that button the post gets removed and awaits for the chiefs to decide wether it be trashed or not.

You would probably need a little bit of php code to achieve this. But it wouldn't be hard to do.
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officer_iron 13 years ago

If you build up a strong enough user base and community, people will be more than happy to volunteer as moderators. People love power, and being a mod is powerful in the online world. Find someone that participates, respects the rules, and knows the niche.
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- wilsonm 13 years ago
  
  If I was to look for job as a moderator, what sort of payment can I expect?
  
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  almondj 13 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by wilsonm
  
  If I was to look for job as a moderator, what sort of payment can I expect?
  
  Usually moderators actually have an interest in the forum they are moderating and aren't looking for money. On a very active forum you might get $500/mo tops. However if you're practically co-admin, posting news, dealing with user problems, on top of basic moderator actions, you could probably make $x,xxx+/mo.
  
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donnan 13 years ago

Dayne,

One thing I learnt along time ago.

If you are thinking of hiring someone. "if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys"
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Mike Baker 13 years ago

I'll tell you how I used to do it when I ran a few forums.

I would always be an Administrator and had full control over the site and had final say. When my membership started to grow where I couldn't do all the house keeping (deleting spam, moving threads to their right section, etc), then I would open a new thread for members to make a case as to why they should be a staff member. This could be either a moderator of a certain section of the forum, a super moderator who watched over the whole site, or even a fellow admin (I usually didn't ask for fellow admins until the site had a large number of members and decent amount of moderators).

There are many way of doing it, but personally paying someone to be a moderator in my opinion is not a good idea. They will only do it for the money and could end up stabbing you in the back. You want to have staff members who you trust which is why I always make sure members who are applying for certain positions have a certain number of posts beforehand.
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seoesangrai 13 years ago

I also confused about it. I also know more about it after reading this thread and post after it. Thanks a lot.
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Ryan Even 13 years ago

I always ask the most active member. Most of the time they'll be happy to do it for free (since they're on the site anyway).
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