Staff: How do you hire?

[♥ ℒʊ√ ♥]

I'm with Mixed . Mandoli . I have several boards I'm admin on that are not very active. And I've got test forums that are only used periodically. And they've been around for years. ProBoards' is really quite good about things like this.

[Mandoli]

Mar 18, 2016 8:04:25 GMT -8 Mixed said:

But are we talking about the site that lost it's only admin or the forum that had a plethora of admins? Because it is possible that anyone with the power could decide on a whim to delete the forum. Or maybe the power to delete the forum is ONLY available to the admin user.

The original forum's Admin came every once in a while when the site was on its last leg. Then one day, it was just terminated with no warning from anyone. I mean, there were Terms of Service breaches that someone had posted. I kept telling people on the new board that, but I suppose nobody wants a sane opinion.

(EDIT: Grammar. Ugh.)

If one makes everyone on the board a staff member and someone goes and deletes it out from under you, maybe you should learn that it's a bad idea to do that to begin with.

[♥ ℒʊ√ ♥]

Mandoli , if there are TOS violations, yes, ProBoards can remove the forum without warning.

[Mandoli]

Mar 20, 2016 12:03:12 GMT -8 ♥ ℒʊ√ ♥ said:

Mandoli , if there are TOS violations, yes, ProBoards can remove the forum without warning.

I know about that. Used to co-run a board years ago - got terminated for TOS violations. Just kind of got the board yanked from underneath. I was just saying that people want to come up with their own assumptions.

[♥ ℒʊ√ ♥]

I was simply confirming what you posted ~ Then one day, it was just terminated with no warning from anyone. 

Not dealing with TOS violations, will put a forum's health on shaky ground ~ even with an active admin and staff.

[Tiffy-Bean]

A lot of my staff decisions are based on trust. I choose people I know I can trust to get the job done and fence questions in an appropriate manner. I don't want someone who has the moniker of 'administrator' or 'moderator' causing chaos on my forum simply because they lack tact.

I also base staff on necessity. If my board doesn't need another moderator to lighten the work load, then there's no need to look for one.

Some of my moderators aren't the best at coding, but they are great at other things, like just maintaining board stuff like moving things around or locking posts. I've found I can teach people I trust to do the job right rather then have people I don't trust just come in and start moving things around. I don't want someone to come in and mess with things only moderators can do, and then have to spend hours fixing what they broke.

[Kami]

For me, it depends on when I am organising a staff group.

If I'm just starting a forum, I usually ask a friend or two to help me out with some of the more mundane aspects of set up -- setting up boards, brainstorming on how the forum will be run, and so on. When the forum opens, I usually keep only one of those friends (if there was more than one) on as a global mod because baby forums don't need a massive staff group. If you've got three staff members per regular member there's a problem lmao.

If the forum is fairly well established, like a lot of others said it's based on need, the person's history of behaviour / whether or not they can be trusted, and -- I think this is often the clincher for me -- whether or not they can handle the workload that is attached to a position.

Anecdotal example: Once upon a time I had a character profile moderator that was a med student who had just entered his first year or so of residency. As the months progressed, it became very clear that we (the main admin and I) had made a mistake in asking him to fill the position because he was entirely too busy to take care of the massive influx of profiles we were getting on a daily basis (this was back when the forum was receiving 3-6 new profiles per day). Long story short it wound up a mess until we let him go and found someone who was more stable in their work hours and could give us an accurate measure of how frequently they'd be able to accomplish their tasks.