Staff Members that goes crazy?

I can really say I haven't had a mod go too crazy. The only thing I've ran into is one moderator who gave himself the title "The Lockinator". He lived up to that title, he was quick to lock threads. A few times I had to talk to him about it. He did however after getting out of that stage end up becoming one of my best moderators.

 

Green Cat, number two on your list is pure idiotic I am sorry to say. I'd never let anyone have any files or database or anything from my site.

 

Thankfully it's never happened to me on any of my current or previous forums. I generally only allow mods to 'soft delete' and they can only ban members and not erase them. We run a tight ship and we select moderators who have supported the forum and guided members and / or reported posts that have broken the rules.

I'd normally never have more than myself as admin, though a couple of years ago a super mod became admin, and due to a couple of mods requiring it, he's now super admin on quite a few of the current forums so there is a lot of trust in him but he is A1.

I take precautions for general reasons such as being hacked, something breaking, an upgrade going wrong or whatever and we backup automatically 4 times daily (the whole server(s)) therefore should something go wrong we can always revert back within an hour or so to the previous backup which is no more than 6 hours old.

One of my first forums some time ago had 6 admins and about the same in mods and it was crazy. Everybody making rules and when a member did something wrong they got about 8 PM's and/or emails and it was hard to manage and the members spotted that. It never got huge in comparison to what our forums are now (and they're not that big, they're just big for the topic that they are) but we did have a couple of thousand regulars. Never again.

I'd not have another admin at all if I didn't need time off from time to time. And I think how we do it now Dave (who's username on here is, errrm, Dave) and I can both take over from one another and it works well. Dave works in the day as a Tiler (tile setter in US English) so other I'm usually on the forums in the afternoon after dealing with emails and calls and dealing with the banking or whatever tasks have to be done that day, and in that time we have a couple of moderators who are on first thing in the morning. Then when Dave gets in I can get something to eat and we're normally both on until quite late. I'm often on well into the early hours of the morning especially when modding the forums or sorting something out on the server as that's the quiet time for us so there's less disruption.

So I think the key is to just allow those you really trust to help with roles that only you should be doing admin-wise, and not just internet buddies which should be seen as such and not business or project partners.

Moderator wise just try to make sure they only soft delete. Then you can always check to make sure they're only deleting what you would delete for the sake of the forum, and not just stuff they would delete if it was their forum, which it isn't.

We've had a moderator leave us one due to him not agreeing with the political side of the forum as he put it (there's no real political side but he didn't like us moderating some stuff) and that's admirable. Though we have an average age of about 35-40 on our forums so they're all pretty sound to be honest.

 

I have had several that did that. One ex-super moderator just got a 6 month ban because of what he was doing.

When he was a moderator, he was giving out bans for the fun of it . In one day he gave out a dozen 6 months bans - all within about 10 minutes of each other.

After he was removed from being a moderator, he started posting how the site was going downhill, he was posting insults towards me, calling me names, asking that for me to ban him,,,,,.

So far, about 4 of my moderators have totally lost it and either left the community or got banned.

One moderator started creating multiple accounts, then started poting replies to his own post with the other accounts,,, that one got really strange.

Another moderator started posting insults and threats to members, saying he wanted to meet them and fight them,,,,. I finally had to ban that guy, before one of the members contacted the authorities.

 

You could have programmed automatic updates.That way you be the sole Administrator and have FULL control of your forums.

 

The Lockinator?