We all like to have our forums secure. This includes having staff members to watch it for us. But I have recently seen a lot of new forums with very few members have 4 or 5 staff members with only 2 or 3 actual members that aren't staff. Now I understand that every forum should need staff, but not that much that early. I am the only staff member on my forum because I do not need anyone else right now, I can handle everything because I rarely need to do anything. My forum gets about 80 posts a day on average now-a-days, and I have 47 members ,but only about 20 of them are active in the community. I am not running my forum like a dictator. I let me members give me feedback and I make those changes or do my best to meet what they would like done. Do you think I need some staff members? Will having staff members help bring in more people to my forum? I know if you give out too much power to early you are making a huge mistake. But is not giving out enough power just as bad?
Yeah that's always been a good question. My forum gets on average 152 posts a day. And we have 3 admins including myself. It's over kill, I know. My best friend is admin because she's a bit better at the permissions than me. She catches things I don't foresee. The other admin is learning. I figure there's no better way to learn than to someone to just give you a chance. I won't hire another staff member until I'm having problems. There should be a good member to staff ratio. It is very silly to have tons of staff without them doing anything either. And honestly I could run my forum alone. But I enjoy having others to help me and getting their input. It makes people feel like they have a bigger so on your forum when you give them a bit of power.
I always hire more staff than needed and keep them trained just to have backups in case someone decides to not be active or quits, etc. Also, I assign them different roles so each is helping in a different way.
I have one mod per forum category (two in one as its got twice as many forums as the other catergories), one tech support and two admins (myself and my other half who steps in as an unbias person if there are any issue's going on between members). Seems to work well.
We will soon be having a mod assigned to the Chat Room as well.
All together we have 2 admins, one tech support and 6 mods.
May seem like a lot but everything is covered, and covered well.
