Making our forums clean is a big priority when it comes to creating and maintaining a site. We don't want our forums to be full of garbage posts because it might affect the search engine visibility of our websites/forums.
Is hiring moderators a good investment for your forum? We know that this would make our website maintenance cost more and we could also do it ourselves. Do you think hiring moderators are worth it, especially for a young forum?
Just make your security tighten and tough so that spammers/bots will find it hard to post in your forum.
Also install a plugin/mods that can purge spammers in one click, when I say purge it means delete all post, and banned account in one click. MyBB has a feature like that.
Hiring moderators for me is not a good idea especially if you can manage it yourself. However, if you own a dozen of websites and don't have spare time for this then perhaps it's the best choice.
Of course they are. Without them, your forum would be more vulnerable. At least two or three seems ideal, depending on how big and active your community is.
I think a moderator is an important part of the forum because spammers are always around us, lurking and waiting for a chance to post their ads. There were several forums that I have seen the spam from time to time because the forums have no moderator. It is like a cluttered home with the mess left by the owner. But moderators should be friendly because I also have seen an over-eager moderator who seem to engage the members into a debate. Moderators should remember that a forum is a social place to exchange ideas and his role is to keep the forum clean and not to point out the facts to the members on their posts.
90% of the time, this is due to a weak spam defence, to be honest.
Things like Cloudflare, improvised anti-spam methods (not carbon copies of what everyone else does), etc. can really help in bringing spam down to essentially nothing.
On large sites, it might still be a problem, and you'll probably need a moderator there anyway, but cutting the annoying little bots is a godsend.
I think it can make it more fun - simply cause you have a regular crew. However, though, with good spambot protection, they're not really needed other than for the reason listed and also as extra posters - but that can be very useful!
I think it's also because they can help. They can provide suggestions and etc that maybe you haven't thought of yet. 1-2 if you're small. Once you get over 200 members I would maybe get another. 🙂
