The challenges of moderating a /huge/ website, and how to overcome them.

[ethan]

Tails submitted a new Article:

The challenges of moderating a /huge/ website, and how to overcome them.

The challenges of moderating a /huge/ website, and how to overcome them.
By Ethan Puskas

So, first off, something about me: I'm one of the senior moderators (theres two of us 'senior/super' moderators and then the Community Manager, of which i'm posting this with her permission/endorsement) on a educational website, http://brainly.com - We manage a team of about ~60 or ~70 (74 total in the list, but that includes some programmers so we'll say the list of real mods is between 60 or 70 - Still a astronomically high number). We are (at least, I am, in that it's hands down the biggest project I've ever had say in) constantly challenged in the management and upkeep of both the community itself and (mostly where I am) the moderation team.

Keeping all of these factors in mind, and doing some of the math, it does seem kind of amazing how we keep it all together with a 20 to 1 ratio for mods to 'senior' mods (or the CM) and a 60 to 1 ratio for mods with the real Community Manager, so we'll go over some issues we've encountered and how to deal with them.

Activity
As with just about any website, activity is always a issue, but moreso when I run you down the demographic of the moderation team: Roughly 80-90% of the moderators we have are under the age of 16 or 15. It sounds rather young, but when you consider the demographic of a K-12 educational website, it makes sense. I actually enjoy working with a lot of these guys; age has never really been a defining factor on if they are mature or not for me and a lot of these guys have proven us all wrong on how well they can handle a situation. They certainly deserve much more praise than myself for grinding reports all day (I usually am sitting around and handling the 'problem solving' issues.)

That said, when we're dealing with such large numbers, and we now take into account it's summer in the United States, activity is going to now be a huge issue more than ever. We've been taking several approaches to this:

• The website 'gamifies', as much as possible, the actions of the website. This includes Moderation, so we have a 'Top Moderators' type system. It gives natural incentive to be active when you can appear to be 'the best'.
• Playing on this, we've (once or twice, during slooooowww weeks) offered incentives to Moderators for being on top, last time it was a $25 ITunes giftcard. This is absolutely a way to speak to the younger audience we work with and get them...

Read more about this article here...