Every once in a while I see a job posting for a forum moderator. I ***ume that the forum has to be huge to justify paying someone to moderate. Unfortunately, I never find them while they are still taking applications.

Would you hire someone to moderate a forum or would you just hunker down once a week and sort through the posts yourself?

What is the life of a moderator like, anyway - do you have to be glued to the forum 24/7, just to keep an eye on what is being said?

Going through the posts on a daily basis and cleaning things up when they get messy, lol, is how the bulk of moderating goes. Removing spam and banning members is probably how most of the time is spent, but there are these huge forums, like the forum at WAHM, that would take forever if only one person was moderating. The job could take hours everyday!

When I first started up my forum, I did everything myself. I have a couple of moderators but they work for free because they like how my website has helped them

I have never had to pay my moderation staff. When a forum is really good and when it has members who absolutely love it, the best members are usually more then happy to moderate for free

I would rather hire moderators, unless i had absolutely nothing much else to do.
But all that would depend on the type of forums and how the people on the forums behave.
Small, well behaved forums don't really need a moderator. You could sort out the junk in your spare time.
But things can get messy, if the forum is big. So it's better to hire a moderator, or try doing it yourself for a few days and see how it goes.

Do they get to post their own ads on the forum? If so, it sounds like a reasonable trade.

THe best moderators are really people who are already part of the community. They will make more effort to look after it, because it is their home as well, and they will not tolerate spammers and trolls spoiling it.

I am the only admin on my forum at the moment, but we are getting so big that it will soon be necessary to get some help. The people I will choose for this, will want to do it, to be part ofthe team, and I won't have to pay them.

I guess once a forum starts getting so big that you need help, you will be able to ask some of your dedicated members to help out. If they are really serious about the forum, they would probably be glad to.

Exactly tricky, people who become part of the community, will want to help, and being members themselves, will be better able to decide if something is worthy of a reprimand or a deletion, as they know the people concerned.