Staff Members that goes crazy?

Have you ever had an moderator or admin that have gone crazy and just start to harrasing members and deleting posts and just tried to ruin your forum?

 

Luckily, I haven't. But I do know of a forum where this happened and some significant damage was done. The best they could do to fix it was restore and old backup.

 

Not a staff member, but I had a regular member that did that. (Poor fellow lost his job and his healthcare, and went off his meds.)

 

Yes, he was demodded shortly afterward. The members are very important for me and a moderator should not abuse the powers. They are there to have fun but to also WATCH the members and correct them if something is wrong.

 

I've been lucky and haven't had a situation like this come up - from a Moderator or any member for that matter.

If it did happen though, I'd immediately de-mod them. Depending on the severity of the damage and their implied intentions, I would either 1) ban them or 2) PM them and ask what the heck they think they are doing.

 

Unfortunately, this has happened to me... twice.

Situation # 1: Moderator Gone Crazy

When I was new to the forum industry, I was very lax when it came to the behavioral traits and/or actions taken by my staff team. Rather than restricting them when it came to such matters, I simply told them to, "do what they think is best". This, of course, was a mistake - a major one, at that. Shortly after promoting one of the more dedicated members of the community to a moderator-level position, he immediately decided that it was "best" to do the following:

• Delete and then modify the profile information of members that he referred to as "goons". These members were selected at random.
• Delete posts and/or topics that he did not personally care for.
• Curse like you wouldn't believe - this was sickening.

Needless to say, a "gentle" approach to the situation was not the way to go about handling it. I almost immediately removed him for the team and he was then banned - permanently.

Situation # 2: The Power-Hungry Co-Developer

This is something that happened to me more recently (meaning two years ago). I, along with another partner of mine, created and developed a website pertaining to off-topic chatter. While this was not a real "serious" project, it was something that we could both enjoy while, at the same time, maintaining an active and loyal community. Shortly after opening the board to the public, he decided that it would be best to "take over" and lock me out of the hosting account (which was located on a dedicated server) without warning. Fortunately, he did not have the root access credentials, nor did he remember that such details existed. I simply modified the password, logged back in, and took control.

He was quite pissed off, needless to say, and then decided that it would be fun to immaturely badmouth me publicly, making statements that were not only ridiculously idiotic, but completely made at random. Many of the members were annoyed, and I had to take action - he was gone within an hour after this incident.

A week or so later, he attempted to delete the entire database. After many failed login attempts, he gave up and never came back.

 

Sounds like an very bad partner. How did you know him? From internet or from real life?

 

He was an individual that I had been working with for years on the web - I did not know him from my real social life, no. It was disappointing, to say the least.

 

Yes it has never happend me but I can imagine how angry you must have been.

 

I was indeed angry, but at the same time, it was a learning experience.

 

That doesn't sound like a fun time, Chris, but like you said, I guess you learn from your (or his) mistakes.

 

Exactly. It was the exact opposite of "fun", that's for sure.

 

I call both of these examples the '[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bligh"]Captain Bligh effect[/ame]' people get some power and they start acting different, and not in a good way.

 

Wow, that's pretty dumb. Even if he had managed to take over, you could have taken solace in the fact that when things started going wrong he wouldn't have known how to fix them.

 

i have, wasnt a happy thing to see

 

It unfortunately happened to me 3 times.

#1 - S-mod leaves and deletes his posts and topics
It was four years ago, the team of the forum was composed of only people that I knew very well, the co-admin was a IRL friend, the s-mod was someone I was friend with on the web for many years and all of the mods where friends.

One day the s-mod decided that the forum was not working as well as he would want to and decided to leave. But not only did he deleted his account but he also deleted:
- All his posts
- All the topic that he started
- All the posts that where quoting his posts.
Resulting in around 25% of all of the topics being affected in some way.
Some of the most active topics gone and others lost some sense because of the missing posts.
I restored a backup but at that time I was doing backups only every 2 weeks, so I still lost a bit of posts.
After restoring, as his account obviosly was back I down-ranked him to normal member and gave him another chance and he ended up being pretty active even after the incident.

#2 - Mod "Stealing" the forum
On the same forum as the one mentioned above as I was highly relying on every one I gave everyone access to backups of the database of the site to be sure to have a copy if the site gets hacked and ftp wiped.
One of the mods decided one day to take the most recent copy of the database and go discretely create a copy of the site, different name and no posts but all of the members and cattegories copied, using a nulled vb. But he was not clever enough to delete my account and as I had at that subscribed to a lot of topics I very quickly recieved an email pointing me to his forum. I talked to him and he closed that forum. Since that time I never ever gave anyone access to phpmyadmin, ftp access or the maintenance section of the AdminCp.

#3 - Staff dispute
More recently (2 years ago), when I had to be absent from the forum for a week, 2 members of the staff entered in a dispute due to one editing the post of the other who broke one of the rules of the forum (G rating). When I was back the forum was in a very bad shape, tones of baned members, the home announcement remplaced with a mail list, a lot of the posts edited or deleted etc.
I restored a week old backup of the DB and banned both of the members but my forum slowly died after.

I learned a lot from this incidents and nothing of the sort happened since.

 

Exactly - he wasn't too bright, let's just put it that way.

 

Green Cat, those are three genuine horror stories!

 

thankfully ive never had that on any of my own forums, although we avoided it once when the very very drunk global mod (he could barely even type!) logged into mod control panel (or at least attempted to) and looking at whos online, we realised that he could delete posts or something, so temporarily removed his powers until he sobered up...and ive also had a global mods girlfriend (apparently) come onto his account and accused me of stealing her boyfriend. my co-admin banned him for a few days, and now hes got to make sure he logs out after hes finished on the forum!! (at that time, i tried and added my own ip to the ban list instead of his!) :o

although on another forum i was on, a slightly jealous and power mad admin deleted half the accounts and loads of the posts.

 

Oh my God, I am so sorry for you! This is so sad.

I have a problem with one of my moderators right now. He has been insulting other members and provoking quarrels.

I think I will have to ban him.