How Many Staff Is Enough?

How many staff do you feel is enough for your forum or website? Can you never have enough staff so always look for more, or are you one of those people who just like to run a forum by themselves without help at all?

Discuss here please

 

I try to have the least staff members. I can run this forum by myself, but its still good to have a few to help around, and you cant be on your site 24/7 so it can be divided into shifts, so say that I am sleeping and then spam bots attack, I am sure other staff members may be on around that time and take care of it. I only keep a few, and specially only people I know and genuinely trust.

 

The question that I'm always asked is: Why So Many Staff? The reason for that is because I need staff from all over the world to assist any visitors at any time, as who will want to use a host with tickets being left unanswered for hours, and live help offline all the time?

Otherwise within forums, it would probably be me, another admin, and maybe a moderator or two, depending on how busy the site is, and if it was being targetted for a spam fest, etc.

 

Its always good to have alot of staff when you run a hosting company. It does help with making sales.

 

yea it does

 

Depends on what kind of site you are running for a sales company such as a web host it's best to have an excessive amount of staff members, where as for a forum it looks bad if you have say 20 staff and only 100 members. You also have to remember that the more people you have on staff the more likely and more frequently disputes between staff are going to pop up.

 

that tends to happen a lot

 

Good points shade, I agree.

 

Quality over Quantity, no reason to have 5 moderators if they only log on 2 days a week each. I'd rather have someone who is very dedicated than a bunch of people who don't care about the site.

 

Agreed there Gimgak, that is something I am trying to change at PH as some staff I know have just joined for the benefits that may be available, and it annoys me a lot

 

I know right, it gets irritating when they do that.

 

Yeah with a host some join just to get free hosting. Much more important to get people who will put the work in and care about the community.

 

Depends on the activity. The bigger the more staff. Simple as that. A nice starting point is that ONE Admin and Two Moderators. You can later get a admin IF you can't handle the load. I Bolded those words for a reason. Take notice.

 

Good points.

 

Yep; good points made here so far. I'm following the same philosophy--only add staff when you need them. Right now, I have two admins (myself and my co-admin), and we have different "tasks" anyway--he focuses more on the server stuff while I'm the one really keeping the forum running on the front end. I don't currently have any additional moderators and don't plan on adding any until I feel I'm at the point where I'm not able to moderate before things get out of hand.

 

Great point, start off small and then add one when you feel it's needed. I'd probably add one for every 100 users.

 

Well it dosent matter how many users you have but how active they are. If you have 50 users, and you get 600 posts per day then surely you will need staff even if there isn't many members.

 

True, especially if you have some members who don't follow the rules all to well. Which will happen as the forum gets bigger. The Staff should follow suite with it.

 

It all depends on well you manage your community - and how many people follow the rules and such, such as, trollers coming to your forum - you'll need staff to stop them/ban them, but if your community surrounds itself around a family-like atmosphere, then you may not need a lot of staff.

 

Well said cpvr, I agree.