Moderating your Moderators

We all know that a moderator's general duties include remaining active in the forum, reading threads, and making posts.

But how do you track your moderators' progress? Do you have specific requirements (i.e. "You must spend at least 30 minutes online per day"), and if so, how do you enforce them?

Share your policies, methods of monitoring, and your enforcement procedures.

 

We have our own ruleset just for moderators for them to refer to if they dont know what to do in certain situations for example we dont allow them to delete posts but instead move them to the moderation forums We expect a certain level of activity too like most people would.

 

I don't monitor what my mods do. I just notice whether or not the 'work' gets done and I can usually tell visually on my site whether it is done or not. If it isn't getting done, I ask them if they need help. My forum isn't a forum which makes me money; it's just a site for fun, so I expect the Mods to always have fun being on the site and if it gets to where it is more 'work' than fun, I just ask them to tell me so I can do something about that.

 

I don't really monitor them other than to check the moderation queue every now and then and make sure they're still moderating.

 

My moderators can give infractions. When an infraction is given, the site starts a thread in the moderators section with all the details. We can then review the infraction and discuss what happened.

The moderators on my site are a bunch of great people. I dont know what I would do without them.

 

I can't say I moderate my moderators because i don't have any. All my staff are admins and do as they please. I trust them and see no reason to hang over them and watch their every move.

 

I wouldn't say that I "monitor" them, but I do take notice of their actions if necessary - I've only had a few problems with staff team members in the past, and as such, I've never felt the need to moderate each and every action taken.

 

The moderators on Pisoga have their own things. They are mostly Highschool students and we have one that goes to college, so I don't ask them to be on all the time, but at least once a day. Most of them just stay online every day at their own will. If anything happens, I go to them and express my concerns and ask them if they have any suggestions [weekly]. My mods are well trained. They follow the rules as they have to and I only received 3 complaints about one of my mods [which were total bogus].

 

Interestingly enough, the staff team member that I had the most difficulty with was indeed a high school student.

 

Well my staff consists of me:18, My Smod:15, Mod:FMS-17, Sayo-18, and Nol-21

My Smod was the one who was complained about, but it was for something that was fair and the users thought it was unfair. But she is my only Smod for a reason, she's very efficient and highly intelligent, my normal mods are too, but she completely earned her rank.

 

If their forums are stagnant I take issue with it.

 

Earning such a position is the only way to go (in my eyes). If you have the desire and/or the drive to achieve such a position, go for it.

That's an excellent point. How would you deal with them if such a situation were to arise?

 

As do I. As young as some of my mods are [younger than me] they are one of the most mature bunch I've seen for their age.

Not only do I think I have to notice the strive for them to become mod or to have a higher position, but for me the users have to also be aware of such desire.

 

If the forum just can't generate activity of no fault of their own then we can accept that with no ill-feeling. We give them a wide option of things to help promote their subforums including occasional notices, stickies in the main forum, etc, but many of them seemed to have not realized this or just don't seek our help to actively promote it.

If it's not of the moderator's fault we'll keep them on as a moderator, but if that was their only subforum they really won't have any powers. At that point they can just kind of hold out for a section to have a spot be needed/open up, they can become more active in another subforum and earn that role, or if they're already active in another subforum we try to give them that spot as not to "slight" them on something that we had given them. As long as they remain active in the moderator forum I will not drop them just because something hasn't opened up though, or haven't had to yet.

If a moderator is inactive in their subforum there's no good excuse for that and I let them know that we hold no grudge, but if they can't keep up with it either through lack of time or they have just grown tired of it, to let us know so that we can find somebody else to do it. We've not really had any issues with having to demod or demote, which is good, and we don't replace the mod or promote someone else just because a subforum is modless.

Just the other day I actually spent time pouring through every single subforum and came up with a list of good things that were going on there and a list of things that needed improvement. All in all the writeup took me nearly 4 hours (well, research included) but I was able to give very specific advice on methods that they could take that seemed like they would work give what had been successful in their subforums previously as well as ideas to interest members who did not visit their subforums often.

I let them know my expectations and told them if they need help with any of it to let me know. I gave them many resources to promote/exploit to help them, so hopefully we'll see a little change.. or a few less subforums haha.

Sorry to ramble on.