Managing Your Team

[AWS]

Choose your team carefully. If your forum is s startup don't advertise for staff. Instead watch how members interact with each other. For one new communities don't need moderators until the member base increases. By the time the membership gets to 100 you'll have a good sampling of posts and get a good feel for who would make a good team member. Ask that person or persons as the case may be if they would be interested. Once you have a few leaders in place then put in some sort of nomination and voting process to add more team members. It is imperative that team members have input on this process. They are the ones that have to "work" with the other members of the team.

Once you have your team in place then as an admin step back from moderation duties and concentrate on maintaining the site and being a part of the community. Make sure you have guidelines in place for them to follow and make sure they have a say in creating them. Once that is done let your team run things. After all you put them in place so you should trust them to run the place for you. Never give the team the impression that you are watching every move they make. If one of the team members does something you don't think is right then discuss it with them privately. Never call a person out in public. As the site grows or as team members retire let you team select the replacements. After they decide who to promote do the promotion and welcome the new leader. Never run a community as a dictator.

Now you have an active community and have your team in place. For whatever reason team members become inactive for long periods of time. Everyone at one time or another has to change priorities and doesn't have the time to devote to a community. Most of the time these people end up coming back and getting involved again once time permits. I myself have had staff members leave for a year or more and come back to the community and become an active leader.
So what do you do with these inactives?
Nothing. Leave them be. They aren't hurting anything. Instead nominate another member or ask your team for nominations and promote who they choose. Whatever you do do not remove them withut first contacting them. Send them an email, not a PM, if they are inactive they won't see the PM, and ask them if they would like to retire from their postition. Some will tell you they will be back as soon as time permits and ask that you leave them. Let them be. Some will retire, but, ask for the option to have the position back if they become active again. Tell them that is what you'll do. Move them into a retired group with read permissions on the staff forums. From my experience a retired leader will come back and read the staff forum to catch up on new rules before they ask for reinstatement. Once they ask welcome them back with open arms. In any case never remove a staff member without first conversing with them.
There is really no reason to remove staff for inactivity.

Staff disagreements happen. The best thing to do is to let them air their differences in the staff forum. If staff members start to argue in public move the post to the staff forum. Let the ones that have the disagreement try and work things out. Whatever you do don't take sides. Let them work this out themselves. The problem will die out pretty fast and things will be back to normal.

The above is tried and true. It has worked on every community that I own or have owned. It took a while for me to be able to just sit back and let my teams run the place. I can enjoy the communities more by participating in my communities instead of managing them. I'm sure you will too.

[Cal]

Thanks for the heads up since I just started that will be very useful for me Thanks again.

[Billy]

I agree with most...but I see every reason to remove inactive staff members. We try to run a lean staff but with our broad range of topics it leaves us with a high number of mods who only have one or two forums each. By running lean, as we do, it's important to have active staff.

Also, it can become confusing to other members if they are trying to turn to a staff member for help and that staff member is no longer active on the board.

[SamTheMan]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Billy I agree with most...but I see every reason to remove inactive staff members. We try to run a lean staff but with our broad range of topics it leaves us with a high number of mods who only have one or two forums each. By running lean, as we do, it's important to have active staff. Also, it can become confusing to other members if they are trying to turn to a staff member for help and that staff member is no longer active on the board.

Agree. And we also have the security aspect here; staff/mods that isn't/aren't active should be degraded to less privileged users (like a group - staff on holiday - with normal users privileges).

[AWS]

There is no security risk. If you feel there is then you made bad decisions when you selected the staff. Just like regular members staff become inactive for various reasons. New job, school, busy with other things. Most of the time they come back. Nothing wrong with them stepping right back in as staff.

[seunosewa]

I don't quite understand what you mean by not running the forum as a dictator.

[AWS]

A dictator rules with an iron hand. What they say goes. You do not want to run a community like that.

[NicoMoon]

Quote:

Originally Posted by AWS A dictator rules with an iron hand. What they say goes. You do not want to run a community like that.

A good administrator makes good rules and holds themselves and everyone else to them. As far as the stated rules and standards go, how else would one effectively uphold them other than with "an iron fist"?

The phrase is a bit inflammatory, but the concept is not objectionable, IMO.

If mods and admins start allowing rules to be ignored bent or broken, out of fear of coming across as "iron fisted" there's no point in having them. In my experience, once that begins to happen, all hell breaks loose.

Our members are invited on TOS that promise a safe and productive experience. If we start bending rules for some, we're doing an injustice to those who trusted our word.

My two cents, anyway!

[phreakwars]

Quote:

Originally Posted by NicoMoon If mods and admins start allowing rules to be ignored bent or broken, out of fear of coming across as "iron fisted" there's no point in having them. In my experience, once that begins to happen, all hell breaks loose.

You can still maintain some order inside of chaos. By letting the MODS run it, their creativity comes out. I say rules are made to be broken, your gonna get more people complaining about "RULES" if many rules are enforced on them. So I find no need to be any members dictator and say "THOU MUST BOW TO PHREAKWARS ". If they "like" me, it would be because I like to entertain and respond to their commentary too. I just post as a regular poster like everyone else, if there is a rule to follow, it's basically, complain to us in the right place and don't interfere with what is being said here.

What happens, is your site turns into a community and is no longer a BBS.

Officer Joe is nice, but Officer Betty is corrupt, I have a wierd neighbor, and a cool one...

Things like that.

The Mods stand by, and over-ride each others decisions all the time, and we have no need to go crying to the admin about each other at all. We don't like what the other is doing, we'll bitch at each other in our private forum... or in public if we know it's a meaningless complaint anyway.. Believe it or not, members like the idea that one of the "MODS" will defend them from "THAT BAD MOD" publicly from a moderation call that they had made.

It shows them that MODS are not enforcing a "IT'S GONNA BE MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY" dictatorship on the members.

As for all hell breaking loose.....only when we WANT it to. I am a firm believer in controled chaos.
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[seunosewa]

Maybe the subject of your forum - "what pisses you off" - is the reason why you can get away with that sort of admin strategy?

[Billy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by seunosewa Maybe the subject of your forum - "what pisses you off" - is the reason why you can get away with that sort of admin strategy?

Agreed. We work very hard to not confuse our members. By selectively enforcing rules and punishing some and not others you create an environment of mistrust and favoritism. Sure, it still happens to some degree, but we do our best to stamp it out and enforce a fair policy among all our members, staff included.

Quote:

What happens, is your site turns into a community and is no longer a BBS

I think that makes having a strong set of rules that are enforced without prejudice even more important to the site. We are a large community both on and off the site...friendships form between members and so do feelings of dislike. By letting everyone know that the rules are for everyone and will be fairly enforced it can help fight off accusations of special treatment or harsh treatment.

[AWS]

Quote:

Originally Posted by seunosewa Maybe the subject of your forum - "what pisses you off" - is the reason why you can get away with that sort of admin strategy?

I first implemented what I posted above at http://visualbasicforum.com when I owned it. I have put it in effect on every forum I have ever owned and not one time has it come back to bite me.
http://bbs.whatpissesyouoff.com is only one of many that I still own that uses the same approach. Although WPYO is unique in the way the strategy is implemented.

[NicoMoon]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Billy I think that makes having a strong set of rules that are enforced without prejudice even more important to the site. We are a large community both on and off the site...friendships form between members and so do feelings of dislike. By letting everyone know that the rules are for everyone and will be fairly enforced it can help fight off accusations of special treatment or harsh treatment.

I couldn't agree more. We're a new community, still pre-launch officially, but we're taking the time to clearly establish our rules and standards, and demonstrate that we enforce them consistantly and equitably.

Many of our members arrived because of a discussion about problem interactions on message boards that was shut down on another very active forum. It might seem like a frivolous topic, but we've had over 2 and a half million hits and over 4,000 unique visitors to the site since Jan 1, due soley to us hosting the discussion about message board behavior, and how the mods and admins can effectively provide a safe and enjoyable posting environment.

Many of the complaints and comments posted are about mods who don't enforce the TOS, play favorites, poof threads, ban the wrong people, allow the rules to be bent and broken, etc.

Our perspective is that we're hosts, and our members are our Honored Guests. We feel the same obligation to our posters as we would to guest in our home, to provide enjoyable entertaiment and a comfortable and safe environment. Given the wealth of stories about people who have ended up being emotionally traumatized on message boards, I think it's time for those of us who run them to learn to do so responsibly.

I'm getting the feeling that our strong stance on consistant and equitable moderation, and our conscientious practice of it is becoming our calling card, and I find that to be highly illuminating of the strong desire message board denizens have for a reasonable and rational experience.

We're also attracting great mods who are invited on the basis of their quallity contributions and their demonstrated understanding of our rules and standards, which are simply based on common courtesy, good sense, and decency, no different than one would be expected to honor in any respectable social or work environment.

A lot of people use the internet as a way to rebel against those standards, but we who take on the responsibilties for internet communities don't have to enable, encourage, incite, or endorse those behaviors, or worse, indulge in them ourselves. Time will tell if we're on track with this, I guess, but we have faith!

[STS]

The "not demoting inactive staff" kind of stuck out to me as well. And I agree with the security risk. There are a slew of reasons staff members might become inactive and even at best reasons, I think it is better to remove mod privies. Either retire or put on hiatus.

[phreakwars]

Oh we have demoted inactive staff, per their request. He was returning to school and wanted to focus his studies. He was demoted, but his MOD position is open to him any time he wants, and he knows that this is the condition of his demotion.. He was a damn good MOD.... Crazy Part, is he was from Egypt, Muslim, and only 16 at the time... a VERY intelligent person.
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[Desert Dancer]

What to do with a mod who is runing a competing forum now? Fire him or keep him that is the question!

DD

[Billy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Desert Dancer What to do with a mod who is runing a competing forum now? Fire him or keep him that is the question! DD

I don't see much of a question if he is running a competing site. That's just way to much of a conflict of interest for me.

[Desert Dancer]

He is not longer Moderator...