What You Need To Know About A Successful Forum Moderation

Millions of users go to web forums to discuss about their favorite topics and interact with other people. A lot of forums (also known as message boards) out there can tackle a lot of diverse topics and some are dedicated to specific niches. Some receive more traffic than others but some didn’t have much activity. That is mainly based on how forum moderation dictates the pace of how your forum would be successful in the competitive space of the internet.

Forum moderation is simply an action done upon by forum moderators. They are agents who make sure the discussion are flowing effectively without conflicts and are active participants in those forums as well. They help other users’ needs and other technical capabilities. Running a successful forum goes back to the question why you need to do so. If you can answer that question, then it would be easy for you to follow a roadmap to forum moderation success.

Before you start engaging in the conversation, think about your personality if you fit the role. Do you have fair judgment? Can you be a leader? Basically, do you like to interact with people virtually? If you answer “Yes” to all those questions, no doubt you have the essential forum moderator qualities. More than just the qualities are rule of thumb pointers in forum moderation. Here they are:

1. Only edit other peoples posts when necessary. People may be surprised to see what happened to their post when a forum moderator changed it. They may not like intrusion of content as if their post wasn’t good enough.

2. When someone violates a rule, do not explicitly mention the person but subliminally emphasize the content mistake and behavior. It’s just a point of being respectful. If you prefer, you may contact the user and point out the mistake. If the violation is identified as subject to ban, just do what you have to do.

3. Listen to your members and give an immediate reply. How convenient can that be for them? 

4. Follow rules of the forum. No favoritism of some sort. As a forum moderator, you take the lead and be a good example.

5. Get on the same page with your co-moderators. With or without overlapping threads, it’s great to help each other out especially when issues arise.

As you may have noticed, you are being people-centric. People who are provided with a good social environment give much value on forum sites. That is what successful forum moderation as a virtual assistant is all about.

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