How do you choose your moderators?
Here's a question to all those forum administrators out there. How do you choose your moderators? The most common way is to pick out the exceptional members of your forum and ask them if they would like to moderate. This is great because your new mod is already very interested in your community. What DaniWeb does is place those exceptional members in a Community Helpers usergroup. When there is a need for a new mod, one is hand-picked out of that usergroup.
Something else that I have found works really great is to go to popular techie forums out there, and petition their moderators and high-post members and inform them that DaniWeb is a new computer community that needs some help starting out, ask if they would like moderator status. I don't petition blind - I see the quality of their posts, their knowledge, and, of course, I already know that they are interested in forums and can be a devoted forum member. This has proved to be a good way for me to find moderators on such a wide variety of subjects that DaniWeb covers.
cscgal
The Queen of DaniWeb
19,421 posts since Feb 2002
Reputation Points: 1,474
Solved Threads: 229
Do you think that petitioning mods of other sites is a bit sneaky? ;) Hmm ...
cscgal
The Queen of DaniWeb
19,421 posts since Feb 2002
Reputation Points: 1,474
Solved Threads: 229
I usually find the best, active bembers of my boards or solicit old friends from other boards.
MikeAR
Junior Poster in Training
83 posts since Sep 2004
Reputation Points: 11
Solved Threads: 2
I usually get someone applying to be a mod everyday so I instantly know to discount them from being a moderator, lol. In my experiance the best potential mods are those who are being helpful but without the intention of becoming one. I would never try and take moderators from another forum as to be honest if they easily left that website whats to stop them from doing it to you in a months time and leaving you in trouble?
I watch my members and get a feel for them before approaching them. I have just offered a position to one girl as she is very active, friendly and helpful, everyone likes her so she seemed an obvious choice. The fact she is a winner of www.sexiestgamer.com is totally unrelated, lol.
I inherited most of my moderators due to the way I had to take over the community of a large gaming website so I knew I could trust them already, but these guys were all hand picked and not one of them applied.
baker011
Junior Poster in Training
54 posts since Sep 2004
Reputation Points: 15
Solved Threads: 0