With­out a good staff team on your expand­ing forum, there’s going to be a lot of unnec­es­sary, extra hard work to be done on a forum. While it can be easy to get mod­er­a­tors to keep the board in con­trol, there’s a dif­fer­ence between hav­ing a pro­fes­sional, orga­nized staff team and an uncar­ing, undis­ci­plined staff. While some­times it can take time to find the per­fect staff mem­ber on your forum, I have a short list of 4 tips to train your cur­rent staff mem­bers and keep them all happy and organized.

1. Staff Only Forums

Hav­ing a pri­vate staff forum is an absolute essen­tial if you want to have staff on your forum. With a pri­vate forum, you can hold dis­cus­sions between all of the staff mem­bers that no mem­bers can see. It’s a good way to plan con­tests, have Q&A with staff, and plenty of other pri­vate discussions.

You have to be care­ful who is allowed in the staff forum. If you are plan­ning some­thing big for your forum between you and your staff mem­bers, you don’t want those plans to be leaked. “Leaked” to take pri­vate infor­ma­tion from the staff forum and releases it to the pub­lic with­out approval from the admin­is­tra­tion. Info could be said through the PM sys­tem, an IM sys­tem, or any­thing really. It can really mess you up, so always be sure to only allow trusted mem­bers on your staff team.

2. Mod­er­a­tor Handbooks

What a mod­er­a­tor hand­book is, is just a sim­ple set of rules of what is expected from a mod­er­a­tor. It can out­line how to use mod­er­a­tion tools, how to act, what­ever you want in it. Another bonus is when mods have a ques­tion, they always have some­thing to refer to.

When you have a decent sized forum, a hand­book should be put into place. It should be detailed, fill­ing in just about any pos­si­ble ques­tions your mod­er­a­tors could have for you. In my opin­ion, if you are just start­ing a new forum, or have just a small forum in gen­eral then a long set of rules may not be needed. I mean, how many func­tions do you really think a mod should be per­form­ing on a really small forum?

Some nec­es­sary things you should cover in your hand­book are:

• Basic overview of how to use mod­er­a­tion tools (edit, delete, sticky top­ics, etc.)
• How to behave to other members
• How to man­age a flame topic, or spam bot
• List of ques­tions a mem­ber may ask, and the answers to them

3. Reward­ing your staff members

Hope­fully you have an excep­tional group of mod­er­a­tors who do a fan­tas­tic job. Don’t you think peo­ple like them deserve a reward for watch­ing over your forum, and mak­ing sure order is kept?

A sim­ple “Thank you, keep up the good work”

That sim­ple phrase shows that you have noticed their con­tri­bu­tions to your forum, and that you do appre­ci­ate what you’re doing. While those words may seem like noth­ing to some peo­ple, I believe it cre­ates a bond between the mod and admin that can really affect the per­for­mance of your moderators.

Going so far as to pay them

This is (from my expe­ri­ence) an uncom­mon thing to see on forums, but it is still some­thing that hap­pens. Pay­ing your mod­er­a­tors is def­i­nitely show­ing appre­ci­a­tion towards their work. This can be some­thing fairly dif­fi­cult to do, but if you have extra money after pay­ing your host­ing bills then why not spread some love around?

Mov­ing them up in the ranks

While every forum has a dif­fer­ent sys­tem of mod­er­a­tion, pro­mot­ing your staff every once in a while (when nec­es­sary) is a great way to show appre­ci­a­tion. Not only that, but it opens up new oppor­tu­ni­ties for other mem­bers to become staff mem­bers if nec­es­sary. While you should by no means just pro­mote some­one to an admin because they deleted a few spam posts, but make them work hard for it. Whether it be months or hard work, or years, you shouldn’t hand out pro­mo­tions very easy.

4. Show dis­ci­pline when necessary

While giv­ing your mod­er­a­tors pos­i­tive com­ments is good, it’s also nec­es­sary for you to show them a lit­tle dis­ci­pline. How much you give them should vary between the new and expe­ri­enced ones. If you start snap­ping at a new mod for a lit­tle mess up, then how long do you expect them to stay? There isn’t much I can say about this mostly because it depends on the sit­u­a­tion. But be ratio­nal about it, and do be a com­plete jerk to your staff team.

Share your opinion

So what do you think about this list? Has it helped you and given you ideas to bet­ter improve your staff? What are your best tips for cre­at­ing a bet­ter staff team? Voice your opin­ions in the com­ment section.

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