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It has been suggested that this article be merged into Moderator (communications). (Discuss)

A forum moderator is somebody with special powers to control law and order on a forum or discussion board. Think of them as peace keepers. They can usually edit posts, delete posts and threads, ban people, and are second only to administrators in terms of power.

Choosing a moderator

They are usually hand picked by the owner of the forum and tend to either be long standing members of the community who have proven themselves or people he/she trusts already (either in real life or online.) They are almost never paid and do it simply out of a desire for law and order in the forum to prevail, or less commonly a desire for power or a flashy title. Companies (usually gaming companies) regularly hire people to moderate their forums. However these moderators tend to be unfamiliar with internet and forum slang as well as what constitutes flaming or trolling and often fail to perform well in their capacity as a moderator, either because they do not feel that posts violate a rule, or they know their supervisors do not really check on them and am trying to slack off.

Division of power

Moderators are usually divided into areas of responsibility. John Doe might only have powers for the off-topic sub forum for example, while Bob Smith might be responsible for general discussions. An alternative method is to simply give them all powers for every sub-forum, so if the respective moderator is not available to take care of a rule breaker, someone else who is online can.

Less commonly used is a hierarchy system whereby "admins" are the "higher ups" (that have access to every sub forum, ability to ban, etc) and moderators take care of editing out bad posts and such, while submitting people who need to be banned to the admins for consideration. Moderating that teams tend to be a highly informal network of acquaintances and friends and do not usually bother with this kind of system.

Contacting moderators

Ways to alert moderators to rule breakers commonly include private messaging them, emailing them, contacting them using instant messaging, or if the forum software permits, reporting the post with the "report post" button. Good moderators however do not normally let posts, threads or users that violate the rules stay for longer than 24 hours.

Good and bad moderators

Good moderators that frequently check the forum every day, are fair and can dispense justice correctly are extremely rare and hard to find. All too common moderators either slack off and do not do their jobs at all (resulting in widespread flaming and a breakdown of rational discussion) or they just give rule breakers slaps on the wrist (which further encourages them as they know they will not be banned).

There are also instances of moderators that are "biased" (letting favored forum users get away with repeated rule violations, siding with them, etc.) or are “corrupted." It is uncommon to see this, but some game companies are known to have moderators "on the take," taking money in exchange for allowing certain users to do anything they want (short of obvious things like pornographic links.) Since these usually involve most, if not all of the moderating team's superiors (administrators), complaints about the moderating team are sent to them; these complaints are ignored, or the user who sent them is earmarked for a campaign of harassment (such as repeatedly claiming he posted threads that violated some rule or other, or random deletion of posts/threads.)