As the title says, are you self taught and do you basically admin your forum on your own or are you the type of person who's decided to invest in hiring different people to help run it. Personally moderators on my site do not get paid and I run everything myself. A lot of people aren't as experienced as me though and don't know much about the software their site runs on. Mine for example being Xenforo is something I've grown accustomed to over the years. I've been using it since 2015 on a couple other sites I had that never took off.
If you go to xenforo.com you will see a lot of people that require assistance. Companies like ThemeHouse and PixelExit basically make a living giving that assistance to those who need it and do a fairly decent job from their reviews.
If you don't hire people to run your site, would you at least request installs of your site or add-on installation for a cost? Just curious to how many do-it-yourselfers are out there.
I don't think I have ever hired anyone to run my sites for me, as I never know if the person might end up having an ulterior motive sometime in the future. My father's website being an example, he has hired a few people over the years, and paid them to post articles coming in from volunteer writers. At one point, one of the people he hired (A friend of his), leached my father's personal articles off of him, and has been trying to use them as his own, trying to get paid writing contracts for his crazy ideals. Did not, and has not worked. Not sure why the guy decided to attempt to claim something that wasn't his, as if it was.
I do it all myself. I have hired people to do things for me, yes but from the very beginning, I did most of it myself. When doing it yourself you do want you to think it's best and the idea you have in mide. Then you not need to keep saying to your other person what to do and what to be done and added
I've hired people to help be moderators on past forums. But I've never hired anyone to run a forum for me.
My blog, I"m the only one that posts on that. It's more of a personal blog so I don't see myself ever hiring someone else to run it for me. I've thought about letting someone else doing a guest post once in a while but never let someone run it for me.
I have never done this but I can understand why someone might do so; paying a professional to build up your website and run it until it starts generating passive income is essentially an investment.
I do all my stuff myself as well. I do have volunteer roles open to help with moderation aspects but I think I can manage it myself. I may consider asking some trusted people to help with my site if it all starts to build up.
I don't see hiring an Admin to start a new forum a very cost viable option, although once a site gets big enough then paid help is very likely. The only time I can picture someone hiring an Admin to do everything is a company running a support forum and not wanting to deal with it. Otherwise, the forum needs the passion of the person who created it to survive in this market.
Hiring people for help with certain tasks is fine. I worry about sites that need to pay for say a theme install when it is simply a few button clicks, but paying for custom designers, coders, etc. it quite normal in my book.
However, if a person has a crazy idea and no idea how to bring it to life, then power to them. Although revolutionary forums are not really popping up anymore.
Usually I work alone, but if I have someone that I think has potential I will give them the benefit of the doubt and let them work themselves up the ladder.
I and my girlfriend does it all at first and then we will ask active forum members to become volunteer mods after the forum gets a bit bigger. But we make it invite only and put prestige into the position.
I’ve always ran my forums on my own. I’ve had moderators but for running the back end etc that was all me. I can see if your forum was really active like digital point etc. You’d probably need to pay people to help run it with you but for moderate sized forums I see no need unless you’re forum is strictly for making money. Then I can see that happening.
I've always liked to be quite actively involved myself. With my blogs I normally like to bring in an Editor and Marketing Manager at some point to 'lead' on some areas, but always remain very involved myself 🙂
For my Crafter Craze forum I don't think I'll need to hire anyone. I have friends who answer questions I might have fairly quickly and I don't foresee having too many reports that would overwhelm me because apart from SPAM not too many crafters go crazy breaking the rules LOL
I've never had anyone ran one of my own forums. I have developed a forum for people I know will or have potential to be successful and let them run it for 50% of the profits. However those people are often times those with 30k+ following on social media already. Other than that it's all ran by me and most of the time only me.
I hired themehouse to create the themes for the site and I seek their assistance on bugs with things immediately related to themes but I administrate the site myself.
Although I've had moderators on my Transformers forum in the past, in geneeral in terms of providing content, graphics, organization etc - I prefer to do it all myself on any forum I've made.
