How many staff members is too many?

[AjayJunkies]

When starting out a community, sometimes it is possible to only have yourself as staff and be able to run everything with ease, other times you may choose to hire at least one other staff member to take some of the load but may not need any more than two staff members from the start.

As your community grows, sometimes you may feel that you need more staff members but at one point would you say there are too many staff members?

 

[Mr Lucky]

The number of staff members is directly linked to the number of Spammers, trolls and troublemakers you get. You need the right ratio so it isn't an absolute number.

So it all depends on your spam prevention measures and whether the subject of your forum invites troublemakers.

 

[Suzanne O]

It's only me at the moment.
I'll start getting more people on mine to make it easier for staff members to deal with it.

 

[mjda]

For my sites, two is too many, and that's including me.

 

[Sadiq6210]

I just realized that I have 54 moderators
~ 1M posts and 60K members

 

[AjayJunkies]

Wow @Sadiq6210 . That's a lot of moderators relative to other sites, but it might be the perfect amount for your site.

Are all of these moderators actively engaging? Are they more 'policemen' or 'cheerleaders' for your forum?

 

[AjayJunkies]

The number of staff members is directly linked to the number of Spammers, trolls and troublemakers you get.

This isn't directed at any one person, just a general observation. Forum owners - myself included - have traditionally considered moderators to be policemen. They police the spammers, trolls, and troublemakers. Their job was to monitor and to punish.

However, isn't one of the benefits of technology to do things at scale, such as spam prevention or spam deletion?

Do you actually need 1 moderator for every 10,000 users (I'm making this ratio up, but you get my example) or is it 1 moderator for literally the entire community?

 

[Sadiq6210]

Wow @Sadiq6210 . That's a lot of moderators relative to other sites, but it might be the perfect amount for your site.

Are all of these moderators actively engaging? Are they more 'policemen' or 'cheerleaders' for your forum?

I believe that they are all leaders. Actually, most of them are responsible for one node only (one section in the forum), it is an educational forum for a university and each college has a separate node/section with the moderators, they are responsible to arrange the threads, discussions, answering the questions with the basic moderation permissions (Stick/unstick, edit, merge, soft delete ...) and cannot access admin panel. However, we have several super moderators and Administrators with higher responsibilities and permissions (Administrators: 9, Super moderators: 16, Moderators: 29)

 

[Mr Lucky]

Do you actually need 1 moderator for every 10,000 users (I'm making this ratio up, but you get my example) or is it 1 moderator for literally the entire community?

We have two mods including myself. We don’t need that many but it’s useful to have someone to get other opinions andr bounce ideas off. IMO,