Volunteers or Paid Staff

[Nomad]

Are your staff volunteers or do you pay your staff? On one of my forums, I have one moderator and one secondary admin, I pay these people a percentage of AdSense earnings. I am staff on a handful of forums and I receive some sort of incentives on these forums (moderator fees or forum credits that I can withdraw or use for other services). Do you pay your staff?

 

[Kale]

I have never had a paid forum moderator position. I have had paid moderation positions on other types of platforms before and it was treated as if it was a professional job. You had a schedule, paid hourly, etc. I had to actually do taxes and got a W-2! But yes, my staff are all volunteers and don't have to spend every waking day on my forum/site.

 

[Aaron]

All volunteers because there is already costs on the forum such as domain, licenses etc.

 

[Strawberry]

I don't think I've been on any forums that pay their staff per se, but I've seen staff members given rewards, such as gift cards or small token payments. I suppose it depends on your affordability and the revenue the forum generates, or if you are willing to do it out of your own pocket.

 

[Cory]

I've never paid staff members and they were all volunteers. Though I've always used free software so I don't think there's as much of a demand to pay people for free software as there is paid software, I could be wrong. I've only had two staff members who both retired already on my current forum, they seemed happy to volunteer at the time.