Harder to find moderators; New standards for forum communites

[Thomasss]

Back when I started in the forum community, being a moderator was all anyone wanted to do. You could post a job and boom, it'd be filled within a matter of days with a ton of applications. These days though, the more and more I wander around these job boards I see that no one really wants to be a moderator anymore.

It got me thinking though, back then, a moderator was someone in charge of enforcing the rules and the admin was in charge of the board. It's just how it worked, you had authority to do a lot more and admins could do anything they wanted. Nowadays though, it's about the community and only the community. Bigger companies are adopting the "community process" which is just something fancy for saying the community is in charge. They hire community leaders to ensure the community has what it needs to survive and grow, and enforcing the rules took to the back burner as just a mere task for these community leaders, instead of the main focus that was apparent back a few years ago.

Honestly, the more you look at it, moderators were known for policing a community filled with people who were probably new to the internet. Nowadays, it's all about the community and how we can give the members themselves the ability to thrive and grow. Even when you look at police departments, it's changed from policing to "serving" which is I think where the community moderation has gone.


Do you feel as if being a community team member, or even leader, as grown to the point where it's no longer moderating? Do you feel as if being called a moderator has almost doubled as an insult? Or do you prefer the more standard approach to forums and moderators, instead of focusing on the community itself?

 

[Shannon Apple]

When you run larger sites, there are always going to be a few truly unsavory characters. I can probably count on my fingers the number of actual established or semi-established members that I personally had to permaban, but the fact that it was needed at all, shows why we need mods. Then you have the character who thinks that only their opinion is valid, discouraging other users from posting. You have to PM them and say "hey buddy, can you cool it, please!" We've had one of those on the new site, but he seems to be a little calmer now. haha.

Here's a different tactic and we have ALWAYS used this. Our old forum had a policy that "we do not take mod applications, if we need new mods, we will come to you." We would put up a thread in the mod forum and ask all staff to submit the names of people that they thought would make a great mod and why. Active, participates in discussions, objective, can handle themselves against other users without resorting to name-calling and insults. The person who's name came up most times and no one objected to would probably get it after admin inspection of their activity.

We have often used a "rotating moderator" system to encourage users to make good posts and actually want to be part of the team. Every 3-6 months, we'd add 1 or 2 people to this based on the above criteria, just to see how they handled being a mod. At the end of their 3-6 months (pre-determined so they know when their stint will end) return both to member status, but if you need a new mod and one or both did a good job, you can then invite them to be a permanent mod. We found that it worked out well.

This was a large forum though. We're not doing that atm because we don't have the memberbase on the new place.