Organization How can I become a Moderator?

@Rafif Abrar - I'd love to hear your opinion of what it takes to be a Moderator.

 

NO!

Be polite, yes, but you should be honest and constructive if it would help improve the situation. Posting only positive comments and ratings ends up diminishing their value.

Being a Moderator is a job and a responsibility. It takes maturity, tact, and dedication among other things. Being nice is far from being sufficient. We should all be nice.

Being helpful is also something that we all should strive for instinctively. Moderating a forum is not about being helpful when simply wanting to be, but being helpful to the overall community all the time. Sometimes that is about being helpful in specific situations to specific individuals. But other times it is about being strict or enforcing the desires of the majority against a potential minority. In that case the Moderator may need to confront or challenge someone whose actions could be seen as potentially offending or disrupting others and their enjoyment of the forum.

This is only a short response to your question. For a full explanation of what a forum Moderator is I suggest doing a web search or two.

 

Someone recently requested to be a Moderator so that they can help others and because they deserve the title after being a member for a long time. I've addressed the "helping others" aspect above as something we should all try and do for each other. As for the title, I need to stress that this is not a matter of prestige. This was my response to them:

That's great that you want to help others. You can do that right now either with level comments, forum posts, and/or private conversations. I would love to see examples of your advice and explanations particularly for everyone's benefit in the Forums section.

Moderators, however, are arbitrators and mediators of problems that arise from confrontation. Moderators are the opposite of friends, they enforce the rules and civil discourse (ensure polite conversation). Here is a definition of what it means to moderate:

source: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/moderate#Verb

Furthermore, our current Moderators were elected to their positions. Granted, they haven't been doing much in the way of moderating of late, but luckily there hasn't been much need. In other words, being a moderator is a job, not an honorary position.

Here are some examples of what Moderators do:

Spoiler: Enforcing the topic of threads or sub-forums

Spoiler: Explaining use of website and making it better with more organization (see post)

Spoiler: Cleaning up bad or misplaced posts

Spoiler: Monitoring and purging plagiarism

Spoiler: Addressing abuse of the trophy system

Spoiler: Encouraging fairness in ratings

And the list goes on...

Has this helped clear things up?

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