phpBB • Free and Open Source Forum Software

I touched briefly on this in the very first blog post here at phpBB.com. If you’ve just set up phpBB, how many forums should you create?

As I said in that blog post, the key is to start small and increase the number of forums you have over time. There is nothing worse than going to a forum which takes a minute to load, takes twice that long to scroll to the bottom of the page and has dozens upon dozens of inactive forums with either a handful of posts or none at all. Even though there might be a couple of very active forums amongst it all, many people will still think your forum is inactive. Read the rest of this entry »

A while back battye wrote a post about how to select moderators. I thought that it was a really good post. It spawned a few comments, one of which included a question about how many moderators do you really need. I thought that battye’s response was interesting. He said:

I would probably go with one moderator per 50 active/regular users.

Based on that, I am very much understaffed. To be clear, battye does provide a bit more detail in the rest of his response, including some ideas about time zone coverage and other aspects of running a board. I am taking that bit of a quote out of context because I felt like I wanted to write more than a simple comment / response to his post.

I feel like there are several important factors that can be used to determine how many moderators you need, and some of them are probably more important than others. The factors are:

1. Number of active users
2. Number of posts per day
3. Average age of board members
4. The level of “passion” inspired by the subject matter of your board

I would like to add that this is probably not an exhaustive list but these are the four main elements that I have seen in boards that I participate in. I would like to provide more specific details about each of these, followed by some of my own thoughts on how you determine how many moderators you need. I don’t think it can be summed up in a simple equation.

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Your forum is growing quite nicely and your user base is building, but there comes a point where you need a helping hand. This is where moderators step in. Moderators are members of the community with more privileges than a normal registered user, but without the ultimate control that an administrator possess. Moderators can undertake important forum tasks, such as locking, deleting or moving topics, issuing warnings or even issuing bans. They enforce the rules of the forum, and are essentially on the front line. Moderating can be thankless job, but despite this, most people relish the opportunity and the extra responsibility.

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