Something I need a bit of help with. I'm registered at quite alot of forums and I can't help but notice administrators are doing the same thing moderators are! Closing threads, splitting threads, banning a user. So this is my question. Why do you need to be an administrator to do something like that? Isn't that the moderators job? Why is that so many forums will hire about 5-6 more administrators simply because they've been at the forum for a long time and they have a high post count.

It's just something I don't understand. Go to any random forum off the top of your head and it will most likely have many administrators that don't do anything but watch the forum. Then what the hell are the moderators for!?

Sure, administrators are there to watch over moderators of course and make sure things don't go out of control. And of course some administrators take care of the hosting, fix things on the board, install mods. But why at forums do I see up to 10-15 administrators sometime? At my forum there's only me and my partner who do all the fixing, and technical things. We have three other co-administrators and I'm wondering do they really have to be administrators do their job?

I've felt like lately these three other co-administrators have resulted to do the typical average job any other administrator would do which is watch over the forum like a moderator. It seems like any forum these days is simply going to make someone an administrator just because they've been at the forum so long and have posted. Super Moderator? Sure! Administrator? I don't see why.

So I'm trying to find a solution for this and so far I've come up with having my co-administrators give monthly reports for the forum. What they've done for the forum, who they've helped, who've they recruited, if they've spread the word to people etc...

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Well, in my eyes, Administrators own the forum, or own a controlling share in the forum, Moderators are just hired to help admin look after the forum, they also can sort things out when Admin are away, I.E I often employ moderators from a different timezone, so when im in bed asleep, they can be on the board taking are.

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Well admins have many more permissions than moderators do. A lot of admins just handle the technical side of things while moderators do the policing of the forums. Though admins can do that as well. A lot of times very large forums will have many administrators, for example Lucasforums has 23 admins.

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To simplify, look at it as a businuss. There's the boss (admin) and the supervisors (mods)

I like to think that the mods are just there to deal with the people, and keep the order, and the admins build and create the site

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Administrators have the power to do all jobs relating to the board.

Moderators have the power to deal with only certain aspects of the board.

All admins can moderate, but moderators cannot administrate.

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Right.

You can also limit your admins' abilities. You might have one admin is only able to administer users, while you may have another who is only able to administer templates.

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Yes, I know i havnt posted on here for aaaages. Thats the down side of being busy at work

At our forum, we have a rather screwed up structure, but it "works", mostly...

- At the top, you have me and a friend, who are the god admins (we liked to be called cat herders ) - were the only ones with FTP access to the site (Dont trust many people with FTP access to the site, as you can very easily screw things up).
- We have a bunch of "old school" admins, who quite frankly, arnt around much, but are loved by the community (aww)
- We have supermods, who actually have admin powers, because we admins got sick of thier continuing whinging in trying to get us to do things.
- Then we have the usual forum mods, some mod quite a few number of the forums...

The orig idea was for escalation, but as most people ignored the "chain of command" and just messaged me (grr), its just got all mashed up now...

PZY

Moderators, are used to make sure that regular users aren't doing the wrong stuff when the admins can't look over them.

For example, I'm a moderator of Syxe Free Hosting Forums. And I've had to give an infraction on there before.

But what I wonder what the difference is between Super Administrators and Administrators on XMB forums.

~Sean

In a small forum, Admin must do anything as a mod ^^: Closing threads, splitting threads, banning a user....
they have too enough admin to manager as real admin ^^, but i think and see, many admins aren't technical admins so they do that as a mod

good idea, thank Captain Kirk

adimistrators are of two types... one who owns the forum and second admin made adminitrator .. while moderator is under them.

owner admin > general admin > moderator

just in addition to all above posts

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