So I need to hire some people to help out, however I can't just hire someone off the bat. They must stick around for a while before I can do so, but its hard this early on with few traffic.
First of all I wouldn't hire anyone who has less than 100 posts on here as a full staff member . I'd give them a trial position and after a week, if they were good and didn't do anything immature I'd give them full staff power 🙂
Also sometimes you don't need other people, I think when you first start a forum it will take a few months until you need someone hired, when you can't handle the forum alone anymore.
This is good advice. If they have an established account here then they have something to lose if they go crazy and delete your forum. There reputation here would be ruined.
Anyway, I grant permissions to all my staff on an "as needed" basis. I'm the only one who can create/delete forums, even though there is another admin. It's not that I don't trust my other staff members, it's just that there's really no need to give them access to things they don't need to have access to. I don't let moderators edit or delete posts, only hide them (IPB has a very feature for this, not sure about other systems). That way, if their account gets hacked, the forum can recover.
If possible, hire from your own community, choosing people who will probably stick around for a long time. If you can't do that, and you're hiring here, check their reputation, FP Cash and post count. As people have said, don't give people full administrator permissions either, that'd just be begging for trouble, just the basic moderation features.
To be honest, my experience is that you're unlikely to get a rogue mod, more likely an inactive one. 😛
Finally, don't forget that most forums have auto-backup (and it'd be a good idea to be set this to weekly or even less than that if possible), so then you'd be able to recover if you had a rogue administrator.
