Forum Moderators

As you probably know active forums with lots of users and posts need to be managed to avoid things getting in a mess. This forum has long had a team of moderators to help doing this. The team do a wonderful job, doing a lot of things behind the scenes that other users will never see, e.g. killing off spam accounts that get created and deleting spam posts often before they get noticed.

The team are all volunteers and give their time freely to make the forum a nicer place for everyone. I’m very grateful to all of them for them time they spend doing it. The team has shrunk over the years as people found they had less time to spend on the forum or moved on to spend time on other hobbies, etc.

Many of you will know ‘niko’ on the forum - he was one of the first moderators and so has been doing it for many years. Niko is now stepping down as a moderator. He’s done a fantastic job over the years and I’ll miss his expert moderating (I would add that he’s not the only expert moderator!) I now need to do what I should have done a couple of years ago and ‘recruit’ some more moderators to help spread the load. So I’m looking for volunteers!

If you’re not sure what a moderator does, here some of the things that might be done…

  • Check for accounts marked as spammers - releasing any false positives and deleting any obvious spammers
  • Deleting spam posts that do get through
  • Moving posts placed into the wrong sections of the forum
  • Removing offensive/obnoxious posts, or flagging them (and the users) for my attention
  • Banning users who seriously transgress the forum rules

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the forum isn’t full of offensive posts, banned users or spam. For spam, that’s mostly due to the moderator team acting quickly to kill it and spam users. Offensive posts and user bans are thankfully very rare so there’s no need to draconian actions.

Moderators are volunteers. They give time as and when they can. There’s no ‘on duty rota’. If they’re busy, or on holiday, etc then they just don’t do anything until they have more time. I think moderators would need to have been forum users for some time so that they know the way the forum operates, our style and what goes where. It’s not a ‘job’ for natural born dictators who want to boss everyone else about, or who want to show off their sherriff badge to try to prove how important they are…although I’m pretty sure that there aren’t too many forum users who are like that anyway. It would be good to get some moderators in different time zones, e.g. Pacific/Far East, Europe and NA/SA. That means that whilst there isn’t a rota, there is more likely to be someone around at different times within a 24 hour period.

You won’t be thrown in the deep end…you’ll be shown how to do what needs to be done and there will be help available if you’re not sure of how to do something.

So, if you’d like to be considered as a moderator, or have questions about being a moderator, please send me a PM. I will consider everyone but please don’t feel offended if you volunteer and don’t get selected. Maybe you’ll be picked at some point in the future.

Niko will be missed, he has done so much over the years for the forums…

If this was RL there would be a Standing Ovation for Niko =D>

-Bob