Would you ever hire paid staff for a forum?

And by paid staff, I mean staff who are paid purely for forum related things like moderation or tech support. If you're running a hosting company or software development house, your staff are likely to be forum staff almost as a matter of course (with it not specifically being part of the job description).

I have to be honest and say I probably wouldn't, even if it was a forum for a company I was involved with. Why pay money for a role that some people are willing to take for free and existing employees could probably do perfectly well anyway? Especially as it'd be a pretty empty, meaningless job if the forum wasn't super active and there was a whole deal to monitor (like on 99% of company and professional forums in existance).

 

If it makes me enough money, yes.

 

I used to pay one of my staff members for tech support. He was really, really good at what he did though (I never got to mean anyone that was better than him for all kind of coding languages, especially javascript), and he liked my site and did some things for free, so it was a win-win. He helped me build most of the themes and new features I added to my site.

However, I'd never pay someone to do what a mod does. There are too many people willing to do that for free, because they a) like having a colored username, b) like having "mod powers" or c) they like a site so much that they wish to contribute that way.

 

I can see paying staff members would be good IF the forum was bringing in money. If it is bringing in money it is likely fairly large. So, I would either have to keep an eye on volunteer moderators or have someone do it for me. Personally in that case I would prefer to hire someone than rely on purely volunteers.

 

If I had the money available for it and it was worthwhile to do, yes.

I wouldn't do it for moderation purposes. I might hire someone to take care of a design problem I was having or to handle my database issues if I didn't have the time or desire to mess with them myself, though.

 

Probably not if there's members that are willing to volunteer. However, if it's a job that I feel is worth pay our staff for then I'd do it. But I wouldn't pay moderators, because it can be hard to track whether or not they're doing the job properly.