It's really interesting seeing new forums hire so many moderators that are not necessarily needed; and it got me thinking back when I owned a forum 3 years ago. I hired moderators even though I had no use for them, mainly because I needed content - and I see this today with many new forum owners.
So question is, do you tend to hire moderators just because they can provide quality content?
Moderators are not only for providing contents but also help you to manage your forum and help fighting spam. Imagine when your forum have thousands of active members with million of threads you simply cannot manage it yourself. Moderators can help you to monitor your forum and remove any spam and help you to maintain your forum.
Haha, We have 7 moderators and 3 admins. 2 mods aren't listed on our staff page yet. The main reason is that we came from a site with 120,000 members and 3.6 million posts and had a larger staff group than that. We basically added back everyone who wanted to come back. XD. The ones listed on our staff list are the core group of trusted people, some of them working together since 2002. Forumers are not always nice to each other, especially in politics threads and so forth, so the moderators are necessary. We have a set up that covers various timezones.
Many of the 160+ members that we have up to this point are people who came over from the previous forum, so a high percentage of those are loyal and active members. It's disproportionately active compared to other forums of the same age and membership to be honest.
Honestly, that isn't always a bad thing to do, as it actually helps kickstart a brand new forum with content, provided that those people aren't just sitting there, hoping that their fellow staff members will break a rule, so that they can officially do some "moderation".
I generally don't hire first thing, but I have been attempting to get semi active members, and have decided that it just might help if I can get a few staff members who agree to be a part of the forum.
I don't do it that way, no. I mean, yes, I do ask that moderators help with posting some content around the forum. But that isn't the reason why I hired them.
I have seen before where people just hire Staff when they think they're content machines. Yes it's an additional job for them to do, but if you're hiring a Moderator to post only and nothing else, it defeats the purpose of them being a Moderator. Not sure if that made sense lol.
Usually it's normal to have about 3 mods starting out. It preps you for growth. Also usually the timezones are different so the board is covered at different times in most cases. I've never hired mods just for the content.
I have pre-opened kind of and let "special" friends come and post around and stuff before the official opening. I don't see it done often and it honestly allows people to get excited about the community.
