Safe way to have several moderators on the forum

[postcd]

Hello,

i want to ask what steps you advice so the forum is safe when having several moderators who i dont know in person. How do you protect your forum?

[New Joe]

What I do is make it that moderators can only soft delete things like Threads and posts and not hard delete things.

I set out rules which I expect to be followed and if a moderator doesn't follow them they will be removed as a moderator.

That's about it really
What are your concerns?

[rhody401]

Set up a private moderator forum, so they can all be on the same page. (and are discussing things before reacting, to be on the same page) This also gives the administrator a place to train and talk with them, inform them of system upgrades, etc.

You can set reported posts to be automatically sent there, with a discussion thread.

I am involved with a couple large forums, and that is how they do it. It works well with 6 or more moderators.

They can soft delete and move threads to the appropriate forums.

On one of them I set up a group email distribution list for system messages and forum feedback, which gets sent to the mods. (via cpanel email forwarding feature) The mods hit REPLY ALL so other mods know that someone fielded the question, and sees the response.

They have READ ONLY access to the user file, but not to passwords.

Rhody

[New Joe]

I have 3 boards which are private and not seen to the public eye

The Mod Room
The Reported Posts
The Trash Bin

This way everything has its place, The Mod Room for talking about the Forum, members, and training up the moderators, then The Reported Posts, where all reported posts go into for us to talk about, then finally The Trash Bin for all the trash which isn't needed on the Forum.

Part of my rules is we don't delete anything, we move it to the Trash Bin and talk about it in there.
Then if a moderator has been too finger happy and we all agree the post or Thread was ok we can put it back....

[dragonexpert]

I do a formal interview process for potential moderators. You want to ask about leadership experience, any previous jobs they've had. You might also include 1 or 2 questions that should require a STAR type of answer. If you need more advice on what kinds of questions to ask, send me a PM.

[TheLastSuperman]

If you're not running backups on the regular I suggest that. Check with your host as some offer automatic backups solutions (some are hourly/daily/other) and there may or may not be a charge for it. You can always run backups yourself at least once a week.

Why the backups? Well one disgruntled moderator going clickity-click-click deleting threads and posts before they let the door hit them on the way out sure will have you running backups more often, you have been forewarned ;).