prolific-writer
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4 months ago
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8 replies
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470
There are many forum admins who regularly hire forum moderators. These moderators could be useful when it comes to managing a forum and posting in the forum in a regular manner. Soz how many forum moderators you may need?
Start out with 1 = YOU.
Do it solo until it becomes overwhelming to do everything; then add a moderator.
Just do you two until you both get overwhelmed, then add a third.
Repeat the process.
There is no hard and fast rule because communities vary so wildly: activity level, age of the community, number of participants, degree of controversial content, et al.
All that said, if just starting out: go slow. You’re the first admin. From there find a good, trusted, level-headed moderator to help as need be. Train him or her well and be on top of their activities early on, because moderation can really make or break a community.
From there, professionalize: get standard procedures and training in place. Communicate regularly, effectively, and empathetically with your mod team. Have good coverage of time zones when you have active posters. Handle problems as they arise and accept the fact you can’t make everyone happy. Above all else, make sure moderation is for the betterment of the community, whatever form that takes. 
I used to feel that I always needed moderators, even in the early stages of a forum, but over the years of running forums and building them up, I soon realised that if I was capable of running the forum without becoming burned out and it becoming too much, then I didn’t need moderators until it started to become too much for me to handle.
I would say it depends on the size of the forum. Honestly, I have no moderators on Revillution at the moment, at present it’s pretty much just me on staff doing everything.
It’s hard to put a number on it. It depends on activity, what you offer, what kind of members you have, etc. But even when your community doesn’t need moderators, it is nice to have some people around you can fallback to. Making sure there is engagement, feeling members welcome, and so on.
My forum has three although one of them is a trial moderator as they haven’t been a moderator on a forum before so I wanted to let them try it out. I love teaching people new things. The other two moderators have been around on forums for a long time.
I think three or four active mods are enough unless your forum is big like beermoney forum and the likes. A quality moderation is what matters because it beats having ten inactive names on the team.
It depends on the forum but a good rule of thumb for me is that if the forum has <50 members, you don’t need a moderator.
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