Anonymous Moderators

Have you ever considered using an anonymous moderator setup? Where there is a moderator account for each team member - "Moderator 1", "Moderator 2", etc. and your forum members log in to these accounts when doing moderation?

Do you see it as something pointless and unnecessary or a good way to keep personal conflicts between members/moderators aside?

 

To do this with all of your moderators would probably leave a lot of confused faces. It would appear you have no staff and yet things are getting moved and closed when you're not on. Not to mention you could never give the person a reason you closed their thread.

However, I did have a friend on a forum a while ago that was a super moderator while his account looked just like any other member. If you were going to do some anonymous moderating, perhaps let the moderators stay in one account - just don't make it appear to be a moderator account.

 

To be honest, I'd rather keep things out in the open and public. I have promoted members to anonymous staff positions in the past, but they really didn't work out too well.

 

I generally don't like the idea of moderators being anonymous. I prefer that moderators are known within the forum as I think it provides a sense of a community.

 

I don't think mods are important enough to be anonymous, but I do have 2 anonymous admins, which is pretty cool. Confused the shit out of the mods at first :p

 

I was a secret admin on a fairly large forum once. It is powered by Vanilla.

I loved confusing people. I'd also have the last post in a closed thread saying something like "this thread should be closed, thanks" and sure enough it would be. A few times I would even post in/bump closed threads. They probably just thought it was closed right after I posted in it.

No one knew other than the admin, my friend, that did that for me.

 

The only time that I would consider promoting an already existing staff member to an anonymous administrator would be if I were to go away and not have internet access for a lengthy period of time. It'd be interesting to hear about what goes on when the owner/administrator leaves for a certain amount of time.

 

I like moderators and staff members to be viewable to users. I think that anonymous moderators promote an almost emotionless portrayal of the forum staff. I don't think that should be the case. Seeing admins and mods out "amongst the people" and publicly interacting demonstrates that the staff cares about the forum and what happens. But I can see why some forums might employ them...

 

I don't quite understand what you're asking...

 

Meaning the initial subject of the thread?

 

Yes, the initial meaning of the thread. Or question, rather.

 

Ah alright. Let me make an attempt to rephrase it...

Rather than promoting a member's account to the moderator usergroup, why not create an additional account (named as "Moderator 1") so that they can log in to that to complete their moderator duties, rather than completing them from their public account?

 

So almost like having a member a moderator just having their display user group as registered?

 

You wouldn't be making any changes to their actual account - they would remain as registered. You would, however, be giving them the access credentials to an account (with a username such as "Moderator 1") that has been given moderator access privileges.

 

Oh okay... Pretty much what I said in post #13..

In a nutshell, I'm against it. Why not just make it public the member is a moderator?

 

I would rather just make the a public or hidden moderator as apposed to creating a shared moderator account. I see some security risks there and it's also a bit unnecessary.

 

It wouldn't be a shared moderator account. I've seen this done on another forum and each moderator has a separate account that they use for moderating. For example, Johnny would use "Moderator1", Chrissy would use "Moderator2", Lisa would use "Moderator3".

This way, members of the community wouldn't know which member is the one behind the moderator 'mask' as you could call it. It's a way of preventing interpersonal conflicts and grudges. People wouldn't start to hate 'Johnny' because he's always infracting/warning - because they don't know that he's the moderator.

 

I don't do this and I think this is an really bad idea since users like to know they not just talking to and robot or something. If the user has an problem with one of my moderators they have to take it up with him over PM and if it goes to far then the user either stops or gets an ban, unless its the moderator that goes to far.

 

But seeing as these "Moderator" accounts wouldn't actually be posting, members wouldn't be talking to them at all.

 

Thats true but still the just see post dissapear without any real moderators is showing. And I think if you have it like that the real user of the moderator would not be able to keep hiding since he kinda expose himself if and thread goes way offtopic or something similar. Don't know how I should explain it.