Hey guys,
I am currently managing a Forum community and learning how to better oversee it. As the community continues to grow, more and more users are discussing issues on the Forum. Sometimes, I am unable to respond promptly, so I am considering forming a moderator team.
I would like to learn from your experiences:
Thank you! 
I will just say that:
In addition to Robert’s points above, I would suggest a Code of Conduct (or Terms of Use or some other form of guidance for the users that moderators can refer to) and a Moderator Policy that provides guidance for what is expected of moderators. You would also do well to have a moderation guide tailored to your forum.
First make it known you are thinking to do this and seek feedback on who may be interested.
Take-your-time.
Asking in advance may save you frustration as the level headed ones you’d ask often won’t touch the job, you may be left with those who are indifferent or who are freakishly zealous.
That is frustrating as you’ll see things the indifferent ones aren’t handling as you’d wish and see the zealous ones thinking they’re prison guards, i.e. you will need to moderate the moderators, if you choose wrong they may actually alienate users and harm your forum.
Any visitor who spends time at your forum increases your sites value, you do not want to chase off any users if it can be avoided, moderators may not comprehend or value that, you may not yourself, spend some time learning about bounce rate etc and visitor value.
To understand better check out sites like
Also, allowing users to interact with each other in seemingly unhealthy ways may actually be healthy, for them and your board, they will come back for more, if you look at sites like Infowars you’ll see a huge site built on bad vibes, Facebook became big by capitalizing on peoples narcissism, two seemingly undesirable traits that warrant a closer look, if you care of course.
Seek peace maker moderators with tact, patience and a desire to help others, ones who only want to use a ban hammer and get off on a power trip will cost you users, and you never know what value a single user can bring.
My best suggestion is again, take your time, announce it, wait and feel out the feedback, let it sit awhile and revisit, you don’t want to loose good, valuable day to day visitors as they make poor, costly day to day moderators.
I think it’s worth noting that often people won’t want to have their communities based on this kind of negative interaction/draw and may wish to moderate to prevent it. Sometimes it’s not about quantity but more about quality.
I would think or hope never, my point is there are two sides of a coin, failing to recognize will cost you, some communities may have no interest in size whatsoever, that price may be of no concern, my opinion is not a one size fits all, so a good suggestion may well be to identify desires and needs first, then form a plan based on those.
Seems likely the OP is doing it in that manner too, ask for guidance, weigh opinions, act accordingly.
Perhaps @Zoe can share more about their forum?
Both of these are great recommendations.
I wish I could remember which of Richard Millington’s books I got these ideas from, but below are some of the things I consider:
What do you consider crossing a line? - The people you choose should already agree with your idea of what is ok, and what is too extreme. This is normally defined in your Code of Conduct.
When I’m looking for a new moderator I consider the following list, and aim to see 7 out of 9. In some cases I’ll accept a 6 if I see good potential.
About half of these attributes are about being a good contributor to the community, and the other half are about suitability for moderation. Great moderators are a combination of both.
Aside from leaning on the excellent moderation guide linked by Lilly, what we’ve started to do is have a private subcategory with moderation examples. Here members of the moderation team can post questions about how handle specific sittuaions. It leaves you with a nice set of records and precident which helps everyone stay consistent.
This is not really needed to be a skilled moderator. It’s on this list because giving someone like this your stamp of approval by making them moderator can encourage them to provide more of this unique value. Further, it encourages others to provide more of their own unique value because they see this kind of contribution is desired ↩︎
I think that a very important thing is also trust. Moderation requires integrity, like when having access to user’s IP address.
A thing that you could try is by putting contenders up to TL4, where you have access to some special features. If they do well, then promote them up to Moderator. You could also get the opinion of the community before promoting them.
In addition, there is also the concept of the category moderator as an intermediate step 
Personally I wouldn’t do this. Some of the keen people will be unsuitable and you’ll need to reject them. I recommend you work through a private shortlist of your most stable and level-headed members. You need people who will think before they act, who can engage in private conversations on sensitive topics without going public, and who can follow guidelines. If you talk to the right candidates, you might get useful feedback about how things are perceived even from people you don’t end up promoting to moderator.
Which did you find yielded better moderators?
I’m currently the lone staff moderator but I have trained people to cover for me and I have a team of volunteer moderators.
When we had a team of moderators, most came from our community. They were people that were already active in our community, helping others, had the voice we wanted, etc. Same for our volunteer moderators. I currently have 4 wonderful VMs.
For the VMs, I created a private category that only we can view/post. The pinned topic is the guidelines and “how to” things. This is where they can ask questions, escalate things to me without doing it in the public forums, and I can give guidance or tips as needed. The private category has been invaluable and I highly recommend it.
This makes sense for community leaders to also be moderators, however seems like there can be a potential conflict with that.
I don’t have a lot of background in moderation, but in theory for moderators to be good seems that it could help for them to be a step back from being a community leader so that they can see clearly the perspective of new people on even ground with long-term members.
That can depend a lot on the kind of site and community and what it is for.
I’ve managed several moderation teams over the years, primarily volunteers, some large. I have never known a situation in which being a longstanding member (or leader) wasn’t beneficial as a moderator. You don’t have to appoint all your leaders moderator, but I’d take a leader over someone else any day. They’re already intrinsically motivated.
A moderation team is a positive thing. However, you need to recruit people who share similar values.
TLDR; we expelled two people over a period of twelve months and now have a very harmonious community.
Our forum initially had a large number of very loud voices. We implemented a moderation team and moderation guidelines. The guidelines were a set of positives: behaviours that we encouraged. My instructions to the moderation team was that when a post was brought into question, we would ask the poster to explain to us how their behaviour aligned with the guidelines.
The moderation team hated this. They kept pushing for a set of rules, at which they could point and say, “you broke this rule.” I resisted because I wanted our community to be self-aligned toward a positive environment, rather than being punished by “higher ups” for being in a negative space.
As the community manager, I found the kick back from the moderation team to be the most exhausting thing. As they didn’t want to engage in the moderation methodology, anything contentious or disputed was passed to me. Every time this happened, the decision that I made was then questioned by the team. It made my role very difficult.
It sounds like by trying to escape negatives in the community space, the moderator space was filled to the brim with them. A little negative in the community helps keep everything balanced.
Re picking new moderators we use a simple method: some people start being good moderators before they are officially moderators. They help new members, remind people of forum policy, flag concerning posts and leave helpful comments with the flags, etc. We just watch those people and have a little discussion on who to promote to an actual moderator.
This is good, that can be challenging to do that.
In general people who are committed to a community and show leadership would usually also be good moderators. What I was talking about in previous post was risk in that if all of your moderators have been members of an established community for over 10 or 20 years then their moderation methodology with new members might not be the best, because human nature can be that a community becomes full and they don’t really want any more members or outside perspective contrary to their own.
That is just general over-simplification, and for some communities they may want to be closed not doing outreach for new members. If a site is wanting to engage broader audience from different countries with different ways of communicating, having a moderator who is impartial and not heavily invested as a permanent member of the community can in theory be of benefit to the community overall.
Metaphor could be if someone wants to give a speech in a town square criticizing the mayor, the mayor probably isn’t going to be the best moderator for that speech.
There are a couple of good data explorer queries to help identify active users to consider for a moderation team.
Top posters in a given timeframe
Top users by likes received overall
Top users by likes received from a variety of people
Top users by likes received from users w lower trust level
Top quality users in last six months
Each of these links go back to a topic that discusses how they work; what they’re measuring. And there are many more queries in the rich sql-query tag that may be helpful in identifying potential moderators.
I also particularly like @Tris20’s list of characteristics to look for in a moderator.
Finally I’ll say that, as a perfectionist who’s finishing his first year leading a moderation team I’ve been part of for three years—it’s been difficult to recognize that there are other right ways of moderating. Learning from my team has not been easy but has definitely been good.
If people are coming to a community to criticise the moderators then perhaps it’s not the right community for them! 
I am a “Mini Mod” on a large forum, meaning I’m one of a handful of TL4s working below the main mod (like @NateDhaliwal suggested above).
Obviously, we don’t have access to users’ background information or the ability to remove or suspend users but it means we’re on hand to edit out inappropriate posts or photos and tidy things up when the main mod is not online. We have a private group chat to discuss mod issues and raise anything we can’t handle with the main mod. I think it works well as an option if you don’t want to open up backgroud information but need a bit of extra help.