Adding Staff to your forum

[Joshua Farrell]

At what points do you think you need to have people (other than the head admin) become staff members?

In my opinion, most forums need staff when you can no longer handle the load of monitoring the forum alone. Most of the time, once your work gets too hard for you to do, hiring 1 to 2 people can help lessen the load enough to help you gain back a normal balance of work. Then again, if the forum genre is a little bit tough to work with, I'd call for some help if small, if the workload has the potential to take too much time out of the day to handle.

 

[Fait]

My site is basically new and dead so it doesn’t need staff but once you get over 30 members logging in daily then you hire a few more people.

How I do it anyway.

 

[PGen98]

Agreed, there's no point in adding staff until there's a genuine need to cover the workflow. I have one admin and one moderator on my forum and they have nothing to do because activity has dipped and it's mostly just people chatting with little to no need for moderation of any kind, so they're basically just glorified regular members at this point. They can act should anything come up, and I'm not going to take their ranks away from them, but there's no real need to have staff in my case. It's the same with a lot of medium-level forums, as well, it's not worth adding staff until you genuinely need the help, otherwise you'll have several moderators and nothing for them to do, or all of them fighting over the little bit of work they might actually have to do.

 

[Fait]

Agreed, there's no point in adding staff until there's a genuine need to cover the workflow. I have one admin and one moderator on my forum and they have nothing to do because activity has dipped and it's mostly just people chatting with little to no need for moderation of any kind, so they're basically just glorified regular members at this point. They can act should anything come up, and I'm not going to take their ranks away from them, but there's no real need to have staff in my case. It's the same with a lot of medium-level forums, as well, it's not worth adding staff until you genuinely need the help, otherwise you'll have several moderators and nothing for them to do, or all of them fighting over the little bit of work they might actually have to do.

I agree!

Like I only got one other admin and his a friend of mine

 

[Pinky]

A few things to take into consideration.

If the admin isn't working and able to be online for most of the day and the forum isn't too overrun with active members then I'm sure they can manage just fine on their own for a time. Once it reaches a peak of active members that you are struggling to keep up with then it would be a good idea to have some help.

If the admin has a job and cannot be there for some time during the day then they should seek some help to keep the forum going or their members may lose interest and stop visiting.

It's a big decision. You have to rely on this person(s). You are going to have to trust their judgment of character so be wise in your choices.

 

[Katrina]

Somewhere along the way the owner/admins need to realize that different time zones should be covered for moderation. If you think that you mostly have members in your time zone and along comes Mr. Troll from a different time zone and begins to wreak havoc while you sleep, then that's not a pleasant surprise to wake up to. Having a team that has different sleep patterns could help in immediately rectifying situations such as that.

 

[Nyvorlas]

I think once a site starts getting some traction and some moderation is needed based on timezones then definitely getting some mods to handle certain things outside of your timezone when you can't be online to handle it would help keep things clean and well maintained.

 

[Deleted member 49125]

Mine's over a year old & I'm still able to moderate it on my own. I would only get Staff when absolutely necessary. I hesitate because I've seen too many 'friends' break up over admin duties.

 

[ChattersForum]

I'm a new forum owner and my forum just opened up. I would say when the forum has 10,000 posts and is kind of active I would start adding more staff.

 

[JBCreates]

For my opinion I think if the amount of members and daily postings are at a point in which you're spending more time doing actual moderation than working on your site. That's probably time to start bringing in one or two mods to help out.

 

[Deleted member 17779]

For my opinion I think if the amount of members and daily postings are at a point in which you're spending more time doing actual moderation than working on your site. That's probably time to start bringing in one or two mods to help out.

This is kind of what I was thinking. You need to be able to spend some time engaging with your members as well. If you can't do that, then you need help.