Being an Audio Forum Moderator

[sidvee]

Being an Audio Forum Moderator, Part Two

This is the second in our series of articles giving a behind-the-scenes look at how a forum operates. I will start this installment out by being perfectly honest: A forum moderator’s position is a frustrating, chaotic and thankless job for no pay, no benefits, not even a key to the executive...

www.psaudio.com

Cheers,
Sid

 

[haisaikat]

Good find @sidvee . I believe our beloved mods could start a thread for their experiences too and we should get to know them better, including their life beyond audio and HFV moderation of course keeping the desired barriers of privacy. But it would be fun surely.

What say you @Nikhil , @jls001, @Naturelover and other mods. @madbullram and @venkatcr I believe are no longer active but they can still come and post once and stir up the nostalgia.

 

[Nikhil]

Ha ha! Thanks for sharing @sidvee!
Sid was a moderator himself so knows quite a bit about what it takes to moderate our forum.

For the large part I have enjoyed being a moderator on here. Have had a chance to interact with many of our forum members and have met many of the members offline. I am very grateful that my experience has been largely positive. The best part of course is the opportunity it gives me to spend time around people who care about audio. Will be happy to share my experiences with the hopes that it may inspire a few members to consider being a moderator on here or elsewhere.

Will share some thoughts down here later ...



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[arj]

Ha ha! Thanks for sharing @sidvee!
Sid was a moderator himself so knows quite a bit about what it takes to moderate our forum.

For the large part I have enjoyed being a moderator on here. Have had a chance to interact with many of our forum members and have met many of the members offline. I am very grateful that my experience has been largely positive. The best part of course is the opportunity it gives me to spend time around people who care about audio. Will be happy to share my experiences with the hopes that it may inspire a few members to consider being a moderator on here or elsewhere.

Will share some thoughts down here later ...



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Ditto here

not sure how it was in the past though .. we did have some scandals

 

[audiopro]

Ditto here

not sure how it was in the past though .. we did have some scandals

You bad boys!

 

[captrajesh]

Feeling Déjà vu. Quoting some experiences from the article:

You have hundreds or thousands of members online during peak hours, all with their hundreds or thousands of different and oftentimes clashing personalities and attitudes, grab your weapon of choice (most often a keyboard, a mouse, and a stiff drink if you need one) and get ready for the onslaught.

New forum moderators quickly find out what their fellow members are really like. They observe the dark underbelly of the membership. They discover our habitual offenders who can’t control themselves, and then have to deal with the offenders directly.

We sometimes get blamed for not catching a squabble within a thread or some inappropriate content we may have missed. The entire staff is not on the forum at all hours of the day, nor can they read every single post in every thread. The busiest forum I work with has over 200,000 new posts submitted per month. This is why a forum has a “Report” system—content can be reported to staff, who can then deal with it.

They don’t even respond to e-mails asking how they are.

Not as bad as the last quoted paragraph but yeah, a few experiences in the forum, combined with work pressure due to additional responsibilities and withdrawal of many well known members did havr a major influence towards recusal (if I may say that) from discussions on the forum.