Do you do anything special to motivate your mods and admins to post and/or work actively on the forums?

Moderating and promoting the forums can be very draining and if you don't receive anything in return...so what do you do for them? Is recognition/prestige enough? Do you pay them? Give them prizes/rewards? Special privileges? Acknowledgement?

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I gave my moderators crap like domains and PPC content sites. They are about to test out the new advertising setup I got going on, so they will get advertising on my forum, too.

Also, if they don't do good enough of a job, I hack into their site and then promise to give them the backups after they do a few good hours of work.

*makes 2 backups*

eh, not really... I have a problem keeping them active, but I don't give them anything yet... altho I am making a little online now so I might give them something....

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You do that too?!

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My thought is, if you need to motivate them then why are they moderators? They should come on there own accord and do the work to a satisfactory degree because they love the site.

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Well I thought it was cool

I give them freebies like if they are having a hard time registering or renewing a domain, I'll do it for them, or I'll give them root access for a server I've cancelled, or even give them a domain that is a few months away from expiration. What I have noticed is in the secret admin/moderator sections other admins and moderators share secret passwords and share them with each other. Even though it's a once in a while thing, they are helping each other and helping the site (by posting and helping in general), and it's a little bit of motivation to be a moderator/admin.

i agree with you. when i had staff i didnt really do anything if they werent posting i asked them why they werent and it was usually because they were busy, but i dont have any staff on my forum right now because i dont really do anything on the forum but sooner or later i will do something about my forum

This is true to some extent. I definitely prefer and look for staff who will help out because they want to, not because they are getting paid for it...but there are some forums out there, tech support for example, where moderating can seem like a full time job...or what about AF for example - more specifically, PostFusion. It's a big project and not always fun to work on...how do you motivate somebody that you don't know to work on something like that? It's a lot of work for little in return. Somebody doing this could very well do the same thing for somebody else for $$...so how do you convince them to stay with you?

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Agreed...

I give them unlimited access to the forum's arcade and help them out on their own sites when they need some technical expertise.

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I give my staff stuff, but they both took the job without knowing they would get anything (they told me this later. I thought they knew).