Forums » Smalltalk » Have any of you been mods before?

Edit: Forget it

Just based on observation I can see what you mean about members treating mods/admins differently. I guess it's similar to the 'don't invite cops to parties' sentiment.

I've been encouraged to apply for mod positions before, but in those cases the moderators/administrators were an elitist inner circle that allowed favoured members to break the rules and cracked down pretty hard on people they just didn't like (banning them for no reason, making absurd copyright claims on their creative content, removing their ability to edit posts, harassing people via PM, etc). I remember one mod who would go around antagonizing members to see who he could get a rise out of and then nail them for 'profane language'. Not a great way to run a website, lmao. Unsurprisingly, most of those forums are long gone.

I've also been in places where the entire administrative team vanished for literal years. It was a member-policed wasteland. The site's coding was constantly breaking and we just kind of worked around it. By the time the place got shut down, there were more spambots than actual members. I used to organize events and write roleplaying guides to try and distract people from the fact that the community was in shambles, lmao, but aside from that I've never had a hand in actually running a website.

If you don't mind me asking, how come you stopped being an admin?

I'm currently in a demi-mod role on another forum.
Don't have to actively police the forums or do things like remove posts, but usually they have us try to talk to potential trouble members since having an actual mod/admin message them is like the police showing up at their door.

I only took it because I was actually directly offered it, and I don't think I could handle things if it was a much bigger community or had actual mod authority.

Edit: Forget it

Mod? No. Member of staff? Yes

I was a staff member on a pokemon battle simulator that also hosted mafia games. I was one of the people who moderated those mafia games and only the mafia games. So I was below a mod in the staff hierarchy, but still an official member of staff with some power. However I am sad to admit that I became a staff member not because of my own merit but because the place was 90% guys, I'm a girl and one of the mods was a horn dog who liked me. To be honest he was on so infrequently at that point that he probably shouldn't even have had the authority to make me a staff member in the first place. Though I ultimately kept the position out of my own merit and was in fact told this several times.

Now despite the stupid way I ended on staff, I had a good time and made friends. I was even know for my stupid luck in one type of pokemon battle mode to the point that I was jokingly accused of hacking the simulator. When not moderating, we played jokes, had staff tournaments and even played some other games. Now we could actually play the mafia games quite easily though he did have significantly higher chance of being killed night 1. We even joking called it a staff syndrome. We were respected, but not treated as gospel as you were apparently.

However times changed. Our workload was massively increased when we gave users the ability to submit their own mafia games for review. It was a lot of code reading and there were lots of games or themes as well called them to review. On top of that, we ultimately stopped being appreciated by the staff higher ups, even becoming the butt of their jokes. Ultimately several others and myself ended up leaving as a result of burn out and the lack of appreciation.