Ever dealt with troublesome staff or members?

[Ravenfreak]

Have you ever had to deal with a rouge staff member or troublesome members on any of your forums? Back when I was still new to creating forums, I made the mistake of hiring someone to be an admin for my proboards forum. It was a gaming forum, and I remember the person I promoted ended up deleting my themes and installed a bunch of random themes that didn't even fit the niche of my forum. I had to fix the theme and I immediately banned them... I remember seeing them visit the support forum and wondered if proboards staff could unban them from my forum... Now I'm cautious on who I promote on my forums.

 

[Cory]

I don't recall ever dealing with troublesome staff members, but I have dealt with troublesome members. The biggest ordeal I can think of is when someone hacked our chat system on our board and started acting like they were the admin of the chatroom. Of course, spammers and sometimes flaming are something I've dealt with as well, as I'm sure most forum owners do.

 

[Daniel-cash]

It's important to be careful in choosing those that'll be helping you in managing your forum. I don't have much experience in managing a forum, but I have few websites I'm managing. From my little experience, giving an access to someone to edit something in forum is risky.

 

[ClicketyKat]

I've known some staffers who just like to snoop. To me that's troublesome because emails can be personal, as well as birthdays that people don't want others to know about. We've hidden IPs from regular staff so that the locations of where members live can't be found out.

 

[Shortie]

I never remember dealing with rough staff or members on the forums that I have owned in the past. When it comes to other forums and staff members though, unfortunately, I have one incident happening today with a moderator going a little too far with their power as a moderator. It doesn't happen too often but every so often you will come across a forum where you will get a moderator that will be a little rude and see nothing wrong with it or blame the member for it. It's a shame as I feel that can slowly drag down a forum especially if they do that to many members on the forum.

 

[Arantor]

Worst I can remember is the time where I had a rogue member who decided that the world was not enough and spent a considerable time (months) slowly but surely driving people away with doctored screenshots of 'conversations' that they and I (and other staff members) had supposedly had. All phony but apparently good enough to fool enough other people that in the end I just closed the site.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I recently banned a member who seemed to be more interested in telling me that my forum and I was a failure more than anything else. He would say he was going to sit and watch the forum fail. So, I made sure I moved his chair outside of the forum, lol.

As for staff, I've had bad staff during my days.

Here's a bad one for you...

I made staff rules that said you must be a good standing citizen in your country. You can not be a criminal.

I had another staff tell me about a staff member who was a registered sex offender.

I sent him a PM and questioned him about it. He confirmed he was and that he was innocent but the courts convicted him of it. I not only removed him from staff but I banned him from the forum. He lied and he should never been a member to begin with.

Now I really try to do a little OSINT before accepting staff members.

 

[Cory]

I recently banned a member who seemed to be more interested in telling me that my forum and I was a failure more than anything else.

We had a similar scenario on one of my old boards. They would tell us our forum is a failure and mock us. They even made a blog to diss many different forums on the forum software.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

We had a similar scenario on one of my old boards. They would tell us our forum is a failure and mock us. They even made a blog to diss many different forums on the forum software.

I remember a forum spawning up to mock TAZ at one time.

That's crazy.

It's almost stalker-like behavior.

 

[Arantor]

I wonder if who you're talking about is who I think you're talking about, if so they have a little forum where they just whine and complain and mock people.

What kills me is that it's the same little clique it always was from the days when .sucks was just hot off the presses, and xenforo got one, and vbulletin got one, and it was the same gang who made them as phpBB forums just to sit and complain.

 

[capnsquarepants]

On a forum I used to mod, we had this know-it-all who mocked every other member but sucked up to us. I had bad vibes about him from the start, but since he didn't break any rules, we couldn't do much.

Then one day he made a mistake of posting a slur. Instaban.

 

[Ken]

Have you ever had to deal with a rouge staff member or troublesome members on any of your forums? Back when I was still new to creating forums, I made the mistake of hiring someone to be an admin for my proboards forum. It was a gaming forum, and I remember the person I promoted ended up deleting my themes and installed a bunch of random themes that didn't even fit the niche of my forum. I had to fix the theme and I immediately banned them... I remember seeing them visit the support forum and wondered if proboards staff could unban them from my forum... Now I'm cautious on who I promote on my forums.

In the 3.5 years since my return, I had to ban 3 people. One who was spewing racist crap in the news threads and picking fights with one of my members, the other who bossed me around saying that my trivia games are "too lazy" and one who doesn't care about the way I do my job. At my forum, I'm looking for new members, not troublemakers like the ones I mentioned in this post.

 

[Kale]

We had a similar scenario on one of my old boards. They would tell us our forum is a failure and mock us. They even made a blog to diss many different forums on the forum software.

Ah yes, I remember when people would do Tumblr blogs and similar like this.

On a forum I used to mod, we had this know-it-all who mocked every other member but sucked up to us. I had bad vibes about him from the start, but since he didn't break any rules, we couldn't do much.

Yep, had these issues with users before as a mod.

 

[SpookyZalost]

Both yeah. as both a user and a moderator/admin I've had to deal with troublesome staff and troublesome end users.
Fortunately my previous experiences have taught me that if someone is abusing their privileges it's my duty as an admin to step in and make clear what is and is not okay in an effort to reduce toxicity and make the community better.

If they don't like it they can leave, we don't need people who troll and cause strife.

 

[Henrywrites]

As a forum owner, it is somewhat very difficult to handle the roles alone and that involves hiring staff. However, how do you get to handle a staff that is always causing issues on your forum?

 

[Cedric]

Already being discussed: https://admin-junkies.com/threads/ever-dealt-with-troublesome-staff-or-members.424 - I will merge both threads later today.