How many staff members is too many?

[Alexander]

I should take into account the amount of content generated by users and the level of moderation needed. If there are a lot of posts, comments, or discussions that require constant monitoring and intervention on the forum, it might be necessary for me to have more moderators. It really depends on the website's activity and how large the community is. It's very unique and different to each community.

How many staff members is too many for a forum/blog, in your opinion?

 

[Nebulous]

Depends on the staff. If they are overbearing rule enforcers that kill the vibe in every thread, one of them can be too many. If they act like regular members and are fun to be around, the more the merrier I suppose. I don't really think about numbers when it comes to staff members on a forum.

 

[Cory]

It depends on too many factors to be able to have a precise answer. It can depend on the board activity, whether specific sections need specific moderators, the type of forum, and the likelihood of it generating more troublemakers/drama than other forums. Those are just examples, but I'm sure the list can go on and on. There's no magic number, it depends on specific factors that suit you and your community.

 

[Sinistra]

I have always gone on the "too many cooks in the kitchen" aspect when running my forums. After purging 500 some odd members on my community to make it easier to convert to xenForo. So I am the only staff member right now. but as my community gets bigger I will ask for staff help. I am looking for content writers though.

 

[brad.smith]

Like everyone has mentioned in here, It does depend on the content, Niche, Member base, but if those same staff members are also the ones that helped get the content started in the beginning to help drive the content direction and the ones that helped with the setup/startup etc, also stuck around to help with the management side it does make things a lot easier. With that said at times it can drive traffic away if their is just staff and only a few members I have seen both sides of that. As said before depends on the Niche, Content, community as a whole and management style which could make or break it.

 

[Laifot]

Board activity all the way. I think that all posts could be really hard to read and sometimes anything could happen in a sub-forum, i remember specifically here a thread about something really fragile was never reported by any member and i jumped in before chaos.

 

[MrDawn]

If it's not an active board, than I would only have yourself and one other person.

 

[nomad]

It depends on how big is your forum (in terms of member base and daily activities). I run a forum where the only activities I get is when I buy posting packages, so I don't really need a staff, I don't have a staff. However, if I was getting 100-200 daily posts, I would have at least one moderator on my site.

 

[Debashis]

In my opinion, it depends on the size and complexity of the forum/blog. Generally, a small team of 2-5 staff members can efficiently manage a forum/blog, but it can vary based on the workload and specific needs of the platform.

 

[Mike30]

I don't think the amount of staff matters as long as they are not overruling. It also depends what is the member base. Are they already used to hang around forums? or the majority of users are newbies?

I was a newbie once, event though I didn't want to break rules, I was constantly getting warnings. And even banned for 7 and 15 days.
The number of staff members is not the problem for me; it's the quality of service what really matters.

 

[Uncrowned]

This is a hard question to answer with any useful information. Going by stats is almost impossible as a forum with 500 members might have 10x the daily posts as a forum with 5000 members. Same thing with topics and posts, as a 20-year-old forum might be nearly dead and have millions of posts. There is also the problem of trying to get 24/7 coverage. No admin wants spam flooding their site while their staff is asleep, but getting to that point requires a lot of mods that would be way too much on a new forum. The niche also needs to get factored and so does what is "staff". Forum Advertiser has tons of staff, but many are dedicated to packages and services that would not make sense to be mods on say an off-topic site. Other forums might make their Discord or Twitch mods as staff on their forum or have customer service reps for their stores or services they offer.

Overall, it is up to the admin and a keen eye on how topics are going. Are staff members just talking to staff members or are the posts mostly members members with a few staff jumping in every now and then?

 

[DrLeftover]

How active are the users. How active is the staff. How much traffic does the board have. How many bots are hitting the board with spam. etc etc and so on and so forth and on and on

 

[ZandraJoi]

I have been the only Staff on mine with the exception of temporary Staff to fix some tech problems. If the Admin finds they don’t have the time like they used to & are getting in over their head, that is when to add in some help.

As for too many, I feel if the Staff are lounging around with not enough to do, then you may need to downsize.

 

[KenDaGamer]

I'll also have to say it depends on the forum.

 

[Nebulous]

As for too many, I feel if the Staff are lounging around with not enough to do, then you may need to downsize.

Even if they don't have any "work" to do, they are still important to have on the team if they provide input and insight into decisions, changes. improvements, events, etc.

 

[ZandraJoi]

Even if they don't have any "work" to do, they are still important to have on the team if they provide input and insight into decisions, changes. improvements, events, etc.

I agree! Unless there's not enough ideas for them to help out with. Plus sometimes too many heads can clash.

 

[Jay™]

Depending on the forum size, even large boards sometimes have too many layers of staff which ends up being just drama.