Quote:
Originally Posted by Hotrocket
You absolutely need mods for any forum..best if you choose a cpl people you know and trust.
Make sure whoever you choose only has moderator level access and not admin level access unless you are very confident in their abilities and can trust them 100%. For the most part anyone that has frequented forums will have a pretty good understanding of what and who needs moderation..its not exactly rocket science to learn how to preform the duties of a forum moderator.
You might also want to consider creating a hidden mods only forum so you can post rules, how to's, etc. and they can use this for internal communications and listing posts removed , reasons why, offending poster, banned users, IP's etc. so you and others can keep aware of the goings on.
Rewarding them would depend on how busy the forum is..an average forum may not require more than an occasional 2-3 times a day scan of the new posts..others might require an hourly check 24/7..you would have to decide that and determine how they need to be compensated, but I'm sure at least initially, until you build up a fair amount of traffic the mod duties will be minimal.
Your biggest issue will most likely be deleting spam posts..sure there will be the occasional idiot that needs to be delt with but for the most part those are going to be less of an issue.
Make sure you have some of the anti spam mods in place to reduce the need to deal with spam posts.
Finally, I would not outsource this..pick people you know or frequent the forums.
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Very helpful, thanks! And yes I will need to double check the permissions for the moderator usergroup. I'll add the hidden moderator forum as well.
Previously I had to deal more with idiots than I had to deal with spam. I didn't even think about anti-spam mods yet. I will check out vbulletin.org for that.
It might indeed be best to pick people to moderate who are users of the forums themselves, I suppose they will be most motivated to moderate and to also continue to moderate.
Do you happen to know a link to a page that has some (standard) forums netiquette rules or something so I have something to start with? I wanna start writing rules (and howto's) but as detailed as possible to make sure that all moderators are moderating by the same rules.