Moderator, Super Moderator, etc.

When giving a member moderator power, how do you usually promote their account? Will they only be a moderator to a certain forum on your board and a member anywhere else, or will they be able to globally moderate your board? Or do you have a mix of both regular and super (global) moderators?


On my largest forum we had a wide array of members that had moderator power in certain areas of the board where they were most knowledgeable and active. In addition to them we had super moderators, the true moderators of the forum. But more recently I have been into a smaller team of staff that can moderate all of the forums (compared to a larger team with limited moderator access across the forum).


I know it depends, so how do you guys do this?

 

We now have a mix of Super Mods and Moderators. We've tried it both ways, everyone as just a moderator and everyone as just a super moderator. With everyone as a super mod people were always stepping on each others toes and with everyone as a forum assigned mod, there were some forums that lacked coverage thus no one could do anything except for admins.

We finally settled on several moderators, 2 super mods, and 3 admins. One of the super mods is up at his job at the computer all night so he can nuke spammers, the other is rarely on as he's just had a baby but he's technically adept enough to run/fix the server should I need to be away. 1 admin is my advertising manager he takes care of all sponsor/advertising stuff, the second admin is the 'member admin' he generally has last call on member issues. I'm the 'geek' admin taking care of all the technical stuff as well as generally having the final call on everything.

Interestingly enough we refer to everyone (moderators, supermods, and admins) as staff. When we have to vote an issue, such as to ban someone or not, it's a staff vote, every vote is equal. We all try and back each equally.

Edit:

Forgot to add this but it's important when our forum first started we had issues with disappearing posts..weather or not the post actually disappeared or not, member would claim they posted something and it disappeared. I disabled physical deletion for Moderators and Super moderators. They can 'soft' delete but not remove posts from the DB.. That's an important consideration.

 

I think it's good to have a mix of both. Specific forum only moderators are great because they can concentrate on that forum and put all their energy into it, whereas Super Moderators have to spread all their energy over a range of forums.

 

On my forum I've always taken the approach of a smaller, super moderator team. All of my moderators are global moderators and have the ability to use the infraction system, too.

I think which approach you should take depends on the site and sometimes a bit of personal preference.

 

While it depends on the forum structure, I personally would lean towards only having people that can moderate the entire site instead of one section. It allows you to do more management with less people, keep the site clean and smooth and allows for better time coverage.

 

I agree. I don't use moderators, only super mods.

 

I only promote members to the super moderator team. I find the plain-old "moderator" position to be a bit old-school.

 

Like Nick and Wayne mentioned, it really depends on your site and personal preference. The more public the forum, I like to use the Moderator position to help test competency of a potential Super Mod and to ensure that they don't abuse the privilege.

For my closer knit forums, Legion in particular, we have a private category with roughly 20 to 30 subforums that we use for cataloging and we give out Mod status to about 15 people to manage it. Saves them from hassling Super Mods every time a thread prefix needs editing or the status of a particular thread has changed and needs to be moved to a new subforum. That combined with a healthy number of Super Mods has served us well.

 

I tend to think of the "moderator" to be a regular member anywhere on the forum except for the forum he/she can moderate. A "super moderator" is a true part of the staff team.

 

I use Super Moderators only. We have backups and 24-hour a day moderation since one of my Super Mods is based in Singapore

 

That works. I used to have a moderator that lived in Japan at the time.

 

I once had a management team member that lived in The Netherlands.

 

I tried to get around-the-clock moderators when I started my forum, too. I never did though - very few of our members stray afar from Canada and the USA. We have a couple of members here-and-there in the UK, Netherlands and Australia. But not many at all.

But I think it works out fairly well; it just so happens that our schedules put us online at varying times, which is nice.

 

Precisely, Nick. Having team members that are located in various parts of the world can indeed be helpful - particularly when it comes to being on "around the clock".

 

The forum will never close so I guess it does make sense to have 24 hour surveillance.

 

I've always believe using the usergroup labeled Moderator, and just assigning them to a few forums for a while until the get the hand of it, get the needed experience and place my trust in them and promote them to most of the forum areas. It's a bit easier with Invision, but it can be done with vB, just takes a bit longer.

 

I have Moderators and Super Moderators, more mod's than super mods. I love my moderators, but the ones which stand out and I see potential in them like the genuinely want to help the forum I debate with the other staff about making them a super mod.

 

I always found a mix was a good Idea

 

This here is a list of certain powers on the board that me and another Global Mod have on another roleplaying board that I'm having a small problem with. Access to the MCP, IP lookup, banning and all that other jargon, am I correct?

So when I see that there's another group of mods that act the same way as me and the other person, I find myself looking at my profile carefully and say to myself, "What am I supposed to be doing as a Global Mod?" The answer to that is this. It can't be just sitting on my butt and conversing with people.

This might come off as me preaching to the choir, but wouldn't it be less redundant to just bring "Super Mods" and Global Mods together into one group instead of one group of mods being left out when someone else has the same authority as you do? After all, they both do the same thing unless if there's something that I'm missing.

 

I do a little of both. The extremely busy boards will get a mod or two for just that section (someone that wants to help out and is very knowledgable of the topic, but doesn't like to stray from there).

Generally, when picking a mod, I will start them off in one section (of their choosing usually, has to be a medium-heavy posted area) and let them do things as they want. They get put into a user group that can mod a specific area only, with access to a fraction of staff areas. After a little while and I gain their trust and they show competency, I move them to a heavily posted section, then a third. After that they finally get to be a Staff member. I don't consider board specific mods staff though.

Each staff member currently on staff (which are global mods and minor admins) must vote yes on promoting someone. There is no personal bias allowed, and when voting no a staff member must state why they vote no. I hold veto power over votes and can say their vote will not be counted. If a single staff member has a legitimate complain about a member becoming staff I will not promote them. Generally it doesn't come to that as I do the vote once on making them a board mod, which is where most of the issues are ironed out.