Do you pay your moderators?
 

Ok, a nice question arised the last couple of weeks and we would like to now what the vbulletin community think about paying the moderator team?

We think that the moderator job is not money driven. Passion should be the first criterion that counts. How do you motivate your team? Is money the right way?

What do other people think about this?

On my side, it all depend on the goal of the site... on my techy sites, moderators are support staff with knowledge and resources.. they are on the forum to answer technical questions, help debugging etc, so they are like staff in a real shop... i pay them.

on my parenting sites, why would they be paid if i receive no profit from the activities on the site?... they have their role and they are pleased to act as moderators because they are proud of the sites they are on.

Money is a good incentive.

With that said, if you are making lots of money with your site than what's wrong with sharing the revenue?

You don't have to provide them a monthly income - a yearly Christmas bonus would suffice.

Yes, very little but its something.

Don't pay mine, but I do double their pay every year :D

I run the site out of my pocket with no other sources of revenue. Wish I was rich enough to do stuff like that. They're worth it.

Rapscallion

We don't make any money on our site - we pay server costs with donations - so we have no money with which to pay the moderators.

I'm planning to pay... is the responsibility of the owner to create a good business model since many sources of income are available on the market...

p.s. Quote me on that Obama ;)

<i>No, moderators are there voluntarily. My site is non-profit, doesn't ask for or accept donations, and possible profits made from the sale of anything in my store goes to breast cancer research.</i>

Site in non-profit so I don't pay 'em. But if they are ever in my area I'd feed them and give them a place to crash. ;)

I don't pay my staff because as many people here said, my site and forum are non profit, or at least not businesses.

no
but one has received candy from me :P after a very long week of work

and i tell ya candy from wales to the USA ain't cheap :P

If we can generate enough income/revenue, we only plan to pay the core staff (2 admins, and 2 Veteran moderators)

Other then that, it's completely volunteer.

I have a freebie forum where we all get free gifts by getting referrals for our freebie sites. So I pay my moderators by switching between them for our Special Offer on our forum. It's hard to explain how it works. But lets just say they get there free gifts like a free ps3, xbox 360, ipod touch, iphone very quickly. Alot of them just take the 250-500+ cash as well. So this is a great way for me to keep them happy and let them all know I appreciate what they do on the forum. And they do alot of work as well. People are always trying to post referral links where they do not belong. So we have moderators for different sections and for different times of the day and night.