The "I've been here this long and I deserve to be staff" member

Given the years of experience alot of you all have as admins I am sure someone has dealt with this at least once.

I run a site for teens(I'm a teen myself) so I don't unfortunately have the luxury of always dealing with maturity that I'd expect from adults but given I am a teen i can easily relate to kids my own age.

I'm getting used to petty arguments, Flaky moody, Members who quit for the stupidest of reasons to come back 2 hours later and they decide they don't want too It's fine....We're teens.

What annoys me right now is I have a member who is dying to be a moderator. I'm sure if he had the chance to participate in a real life Hunger games competition...everyone would be dead in like 2 mins. He's that determined.

Site's almost a year old and he was one of the original first 5 members(I think number 5). So it's not like he has never had a chance to be staff...in fact, he has had like 10 chances and has failed each time.

He has made promises he can't keep and to be honest, he isn't liked. He whines, complains, laments about nobody liking him(When he has treated 98 percent of the members badly) and he somehow believes in his mind if he is staff..that will make people respect him.

I made a deal with him if he got the support of enough staff member and a few members that believed he deserved chance #11, I'd allow him to be staff. Of course he didn't get all the people so now he wants me to snap my fingers and ask the community to back him up.

First of all, I half the time can't even get my community to even post or create topics...so how on earth can i get them to back someone they don't like lol

He claims he has so much good he wants to do for the site and wants to help...and I keep trying to explain to him you can do good by being a member....an Admin is just a member with a ton of responsibilities. To become an admin or mod, you need to be a good member.

I thought about simply just giving him a cool color, giving him his own special title and letting him be a moderator of the Offtopic/Forum Games area...But then I am willing to bet, he'll be like

"Why Can't I see the moderator panel or the mod forum? I want to be able to this and that. I should have more powers."

I want to honestly say..."No, you can't be a staff member. You have literally had at least 10 chances and you have failed miserably. You tried to use MY SITE to promote your site(which is a huge reason why I won't allow him to be staff) without my permission. I'd like this conversation to be dropped because you are not contributing anything but negativity to the site and if you can't drop this conversation, you may need to simply log off and leave."

^thats what i want to say but I'm trying to be respectful and I don't want to hurt his feeligns too bad. How do you or would you handle this type of member?

 

It's was tough for me to turn away some members, but I think I wouldn't blink twice at telling your member this...

Being a mod is like having a drivers license. It's a right that has to be earned and all the campaigning in the world to other drivers/instructors won't get you a license and it won't get you a mod position on this site. Mod positions are only created when the need arises and not given away as rewards for reaching a milestone. Thank you for your interest.

On a side note, I wouldn't have struck a deal with him regarding getting enough people on his side. It sets a bad precedence. Just imagine if he did manage to get enough people behind him, then what? Make him a mod and instead of having a troublesome member you'll have a troublesome mod? There are a few more scenarios I can think of as to why I think it's a bad idea to "negotiate" a mod position. I hope this helps Best of luck.

 

yeah not my finest hour :/ but thanks for that!

 

Just take it easy. So, you won't hurt his feelings like you said.
However, I don't think its a good idea to give him a mod position. You said he used your site to promote his without your permission, he's 98% bad to other members, he's been there but failed 10 times. All of the above are characteristics of a bad mod.
What am going to do is tell him the truth with reasons in a nice way.

 

Usually when someone begs for a position, they don't deserve it. Members who work hard, and show that they're well-liked among the community, and are willing to bring more people to the site and/or work towards the goal of becoming a moderator deserve it.

Personally, I really don't care how long someone has been a member. If they're not mod-worthy, then they're not working for me.

 

That and if you're willing to put in as much work as me - meaning, you know how to carry the topics, post new topics, and get the users going. If I really like someone as a user, I ask them if they want to join my team. @Brandon has it down. I was honored when he asked me to join him because he's always been someone I've grown to admire over the years.

 

Members who want to get a mod position are always very suspicious to me. If I need moderators I just ask the members I trust most and believe could do the job according to my imagination.
The bad, in my experience it's often more workload having moderators than without them. That's the reason I prefer to do the job alone.

 

How can you do the job alone if you have 100k posts, and 200 users online or more on a daily basis? Seems like a tough job to me to do it alone, really.

 

My main forum has 288.000 posts and 16.000 members, average posts a day is between 50-300 posts. Some additional tasks are: moderating new gallery entries, link directory, reviews, managing advertisings etc.
That's not really hard to manage if you have no other job.
Ok, if I would have a really big board with 1000 new members and 10.000 posts a day it wouldn't be possible.

 

So I am beginning to think this dude has some serious emotional issues that delve way past my scope of expertise. He was messaging my Second in command aka the nicest one on the staff(even more so than me) and talking about how miserable he is and how he was wanting to quit because he feels like the scum of the site(98 percent of the issues arise come from how he has treated others).....

She was being really nice, trying to convince him NOT to quit and being supportive(more so than i would care to do as I don't have patience to keep babying someone up for 3 hours straight) and somehow he gathered from her nice and supportive message telling him not to get down that she "somehow hates him" and that i hate him lol.

He was banned from our chatbox for 11 hours because he was causing drama. i even told him and the other person involved to take it to our rant section of the forum but he refused to. i had to leave chat and the forum for a bit(it's my b-day weekend) and i came back and found out he had gotten banned.

I still for the life of me can not figure out WHY he is so obessed with being a staff member. I literally sometimes get frustrated and don't even want to be staff lol so i can't figure out what his deal is lol.

 

Some people just want power. Power ego trips I would say.

 

And don't forget, he's just a teen.

 

Wouldn't matter because it comes down to A) is this person immature? B) Are they mature enough to handle the the users while being a moderators? Teens strive for power and drama. I know that first hand.

 

a 14 year old who acts liike he is 8

 

I usually seek the staff out myself from the users I see posting here and on other sites. I've been asked to help out on other forums and it seems they went about picking their staff the same way.

 

That's when I would clown him all the time. I have a 14 year old user on my community and he's pretty mature. He's also a coder so that's quite nice.

 

Let's trade, eh

I'll take the coder and you can take my 14 year old who needs his hand held everytime he posts

 

Send him my way, I bet I could train him and help him change his ways. We have some drama lords on my site as well. We just allow them to go on because our friendly community always turns this around. Lol. People love drama I guess. We've had two threads in the past month to hit over 50k hits.

 

50k from the drama?