This is one of the issues I struggle with the most. Basically how much rope do you give out to your forum staff. For me it depends on a variety of factors, inlcuding how well I know the people involved, how much personal time I have to devote to those particular forums and what kind of userbase I have on the forum in question.

Sometimes I feel like I give my staff too much power and tend to focus on other areas. With the right staff this can workout well, but what about when you have staff members with an agenda or those who may not 100% represent the entire attitude you are trying to convey and share with your users? Sometimes the enthusiasm of a good moderator can be a negative if left as the steering hand of the forums. Do others share this experience, or am I standing alone?

I am not in any kind of dire straits, I am just in the process of re-evaulating my own time investments in my various projects and how my lack of participation on some sites may be negatively impacting them. Do you find with an owner/admin presence your forums turn out differently?

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Owner/admin presence in all small to medium sized forums makes a huge impact on the overall well being of a forum. I don't know how to stress this enough...if you spend a lot of time in your forums and are dedicated to them, then they will do well...if you do not spend enough time in your forums, then they will not do well.

That said, it doesn't stop at you either...as you're hinting at, the attitude of your staff is also very important. Think about a retail store for example. When you are a customer in a retail store and have a bad experience, is it typically because of an employee or the manager? More likely than not, it is the employee. The employees are the people who represent a company, and typically the most successful businesses are the one's who recognize this...You can't make your customers happy if you have unhappy or inadequate employees. The same goes for a forum...Your staff need to be well-informed and they need to represent your forums well.

The first step to doing this is to only recruit staff who you are confident can do this. Once you recruit them, then you train them...run through your procedures, run through your forum "values". What I like to do is create a thread for all new staff to read that contains everything they need to know. As time goes on, if you don't like what you are seeing, mention it to them...remind them of what they should be doing and make sure that they understand where you're coming from. Hopefully things turn around, if not, then you talk to them again...if it gets too bad, then worse comes to worst, and you consider dropping them. You do whatever is in the best interest for your community...don't keep a bad staff member on board if they're tarnishing your forums.

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Before my current forum on Vbulliten, 'The Basement', we where on invisionfree, called 'DrkSnpr14's Basement'. You can tell pretty much from the name that I ran most of the forum myself. When we switched, I wanted to try and move the forum in a different direction, and allow my staff some more power in what goes on.

I'm still and always will be a large contributer to the forum, but I don't want to be all powerful anymore. If something goes wrong and I'm busy doing something else, there's nobody to help, which can really cripple us if we were ever invaded or hacked. With that as well, I'll be attending college next eyar, and will have much less time to contribute, so in order to survive and maintain stability, I have to dish out the power a bit

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After seeing boards hacked from mods, and admins, I would take it very slow on letting them into things that can destroy your board. Trust is a huge issue, and sometimes people change over time,

I'm trying one mod per cat. forum. that way as time goes on, if one gets tooo mad, or cranky, they can only hurt the one catagory.

That is until I get to know them alot more.

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I never thought about too many things when getting mods. They are selected from the best members and I have and they do have some powers, although limited: they can delete and do the "cleaning". When it comes to banning, deleting accounts and so on .. I am the only one in charge

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I personally treat my staff like my users, if they do something wrong they get punished for it. The only powers I tend to give them is banning(temp), able to warn people, deleting/locking threads. I normall have though, a forum for only staff, that only staff can see (Hince why it's called the STAFF FORUM). I think I don't give any leedway, because well they came here to do a job, and that's how I'm going to treat them, like I'm the boss and they are my workers. Of coruse not like slaves(that would be wrong).

From my work on larger communities in the past where staff had all powers it worked quite well, but we did have one case where a rapidly promoted staff member did a bit of damage.

Like others have said it's about trust and also making sure that they cannot do more than you can.

One of the main things I have found is not to promote a staff member straight from a user, make them a moderator and see how they do (I personally never take on staff who have not used the forum for any less than 4-6 months and they would need to have been a moderator who did well.)

Also in regards to punishment etc. I do not have very much leeway at all, if they abuse they're power they're either demoted to a moderator or back to a user.

I don't give my staff too much power at all. I give them the basics to access the staff area and then I have a few moderators who help enforcing the rules and making sure everything is running smoothly. If I see a particular moderator is doing an excellent job for a certain period of time then I'll promote them to a Super Moderator, give them a few more abilities and powers and see how they do.

Generally there's only two or three admins depending on the size of the forum. One is me and the others are ones who I have worked with on a bunch of previous sites and know they do a good job and aren't out to ruin anything.

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{ CHAOTICMUNKY }

I limit my staff members, but only to a certain extent. For example, moderators have all of the standard powers, but no more than that. I will never give one moderator more power than another. Doing so may cause an "egotistical mess", as I like to call it. As for moderation techniques, I'm pretty easy going, and I let minor issues (moving threads for no reason, locking threads by mistake) slide, for the most. As long as my staff members don't abuse their powers, I pretty much allow them to go about moderating using their own style.

Chris