Handling late-night posters

[Luigi1632]

Not all staff members or admins can handle posters who post late-at-night, especially with some of staff being asleep. While it is nice to wake up to a bunch of posts in the morning, it can feel overwhelming. How do you handle late-night posters? What should new administrators do?

I haven't had much late-night posters yet, but I'm not sure what to do when my forum gets off the ground. I can't stay up as late as I used to.

 

[Nebulous]

Not all staff members or admins can handle posters who post late-at-night, especially with some of staff being asleep. While it is nice to wake up to a bunch of posts in the morning, it can feel overwhelming. How do you handle late-night posters? What should new administrators do?

I haven't had much late-night posters yet, but I'm not sure what to do when my forum gets off the ground. I can't stay up as late as I used to.

Have moderators that live in different parts of the world. But its not really anything to worry about. Your members shouldn't need a babysitter online at all times. If something happens late night (like spam or member drama), you can deal with it in the morning. No biggie.

 

[Lord Saru]

You can solve this issues in two ways.

1. Hire a moderator from different timezone. when you do so, always ensure that he/she has daylight when you, as an admin experience the night time. This is because, often, people end up hiring moderators from different timezones on the false promise of being up all night.

2. Arrange a moderation queue only for the posts during the proposed time periods.

But as the poster above me indicated, it is completely unnecessary and you can always deal with issues when you personally gets to see it in the morning. Always have the ideal member-staff ratio in mind.

 

[Nebulous]

2. Arrange a moderation queue only for the posts during the proposed time periods.

Yuck, I would never stay active at a forum with something like that in place. :shake:

 

[Lord Saru]

Actually its not that bad an idea when you limit the moderation queue to members having less than a prefixed post count and to specific areas of forum. Like if a spammer intends to spam your forum, imagine how surprised he/she will be to find that the posts made are on moderation queue when a staff is not online.

 

[Nebulous]

Actually its not that bad an idea when you limit the moderation queue to members having less than a prefixed post count and to specific areas of forum. Like if a spammer intends to spam your forum, imagine how surprised he/she will be to find that the posts made are on moderation queue when a staff is not online.

Not really, a brand new member trying to get a feel for the place and getting hit with moderator queue messages will most likely be turned off and not return. First impressions are key.

 

[SarahKik]

That would definitely be a turn off for me =/

My forum has some late night posters but we've never run into any issues so far. I just make my rounds around the forum in the morning or use the "Active Topics" listing to see what's going on. We don't get very many spammers but if we do members usually report it and it's cleaned up right away as soon as a staff member gets online.

I don't think it'd be a good idea to put time restrictions in for postings. Members on a different schedule or ones that can only get on at those times might feel alienated. Like said above, if it's a concern then just hire a moderator in a different time zone or someone who is a late night poster themselves 🙂

 

[Azareal]

Actually its not that bad an idea when you limit the moderation queue to members having less than a prefixed post count and to specific areas of forum. Like if a spammer intends to spam your forum, imagine how surprised he/she will be to find that the posts made are on moderation queue when a staff is not online.

It's usually a bot so, I can't imagine them being surprised.
What you really need is a feature or a plugin which detects when one user is posting a suspiciously high number of links and then, flags them for approval.

If a spammer has only made one or two posts then, that's easily manageable.
Bonus points, if you can place users in a mod queue depending on whether they're using a proxy.

 

[Forces of Steel]

This isn't really an issue for us, considering that two of our moderators are pretty active past nighttime.

One of them is really good at getting under a crybaby's skin.