Too many mods

[MisterBobbyPin]

How do you know when there are too many mods on your forum? It's a rather difficult trick but the best suggestion I have is to figure out how active your mods are. What do you think?

 

[Shortie]

Usually, there are too many mods when the amount of mods outweighs the number of members you have.

Whenever I hire any mods, I always start off with two and then I leave it at that, once we reach over 100 members and activity starts picking up, that is when I may hire one more and see how things go then.

It all depends on your forum, how active it is and whether you need more mods or if things can still run smoothly with the number of mods you have.

 

[joelr]

There's a certain promotion forum where it seems like every member is either a staff or ex-staff. The staff are all enthusiastic and well meaning at first, but there's so much churn and burn.

It's a good example of very little strategy and way too much staff.

 

[Reverie]

I think starting a forum with at least 2 mods if you're a general forum is a good idea. Trying to find staff with different time zones/sleep schedules is helpful as well. Once you grow you hire more. A service forum can be difficult to hire for because you want to be well staffed. Let's just say a promotion forum and just starting out I would stay 2 community, 2 package team members and then once there is too many requests and not enough people to do them, that's when you hire more. Once your community has more than 200 members 3 community team members might be helpful as well.

You know it's too many moderators if it is really just the moderation team communicating throughout the forum with no one else communicating, people aren't able to do their assigned role because someone else took care of it. I also feel like if the forum is able to run without one of the moderators even participating, it might mean that that person is not needed.

 

[guyyanthony]

I only have 2 admins and 2 mods, which i do think for the size of the forum is reasonable.

i don't think i'll be looking for any further staff until the site get's bigger.

 

[Cedric]

I don’t like forums being overrun by staff. We've got 8 Staff members which is reasonably good for our activity. There's always someone online so that's what you should aim for imo. You never know when a troll could sign up and do damage to the forum. There has been a time where I hired someone (ex-staff team) that I regretted it quite fast. But I'm not going into that here.

I agree with @joelr - I think I know which forum he means and that place is being overrun by staff, more staff than members. Feels awkward to be there.

 

[Cedric]

Also, you need to know that for every 100 members you only get to keep like 10%. So, ideally you should have 1 moderator per 100 registered members. But that is no where near accurate and that depends from forum to forum. So realistically, it's best to look at it individually and go as you think that's best for your community. I know that's a bit contradicting, but ehh.. hard to explain.

 

[Reverie]

I also remember when we started forums with a full staff team. Sometimes that was okay back then because forums grew quite quickly. Sometimes having the right team made for good advertisement in itself.

 

[ClicketyKat]

For our newest forum, we started off with multiple staff members because we weren't sure in what capacity they were willing to work for us. We had some come and go before we even had our grand opening!! Then we had some that would never respond to us, so we had to let them go and I think we're at a point where we now have 2 moderators and 1 service team member and that is a good fit for us. We'll change it as necessary, of course.

It was nice at the beginning having a lot of staff because they seemed enthused about the project. We wanted that enthusiasm to carry over to the people they knew to spread the word about us.

 

[Cory]

Being a one-man army, I think I have too few mods for a forum that has 14,000+ posts and almost 1400+ members. But, I seem to manage it well by myself. I think the activity would pick up some if I had moderators consistently contributing to the board. But, I'm mainly interested in building up the resources, which I can mostly manage to do on my own, especially when people give me ideas. It would be nice to have more theme creators contributing, however, since I get burnt out on building themes quite frequently.

Regarding the topic on hand, I think you can have too many mods when a majority of the activity is coming from the moderators and not the members. It's great to have a staff team that flourishes and always builds on the content of the board, but when your primary posting activity comes from your staff team, then you probably have too many mods than the forum currently needs.

 

[Ravenfreak]

I usually wait until I get a certain amount of activity on my forum before promoting someone. If you have more staff than members on your forum, then you have too many mods IMO.

 

[joelr]

I want to add that when you see a forum constantly post news about new mods being promoted or retired, it's almost like the news of the site's management takes over the content of the site. It becomes distracting. There should be stability. There should be consistency. There should be a unified moderation framework that is well understood by both staff and members.

I've never understood the need for forums to have a lot of Administrators, Moderators, Team Lead this, Content lead that, and then have all of them quit and retire and be promoted every three months 🤪

 

[Cedric]

I want to add that when you see a forum constantly post news about new mods being promoted or retired, it's almost like the news of the site's management takes over the content of the site. It becomes distracting. There should be stability. There should be consistency. There should be a unified moderation framework that is well understood by both staff and members.

I've never understood the need for forums to have a lot of Administrators, Moderators, Team Lead this, Content lead that, and then have all of them quit and retire and be promoted every three months 🤪

Oh gee, which forum is this you're talking about? 🙈 Is it the same that is mostly run by staff? On a serious note, you're right though, it's not done and often shows bad leadership.