Forum Moderator

photo.net, established in 1993, is looking for volunteer forum moderators. Each forum should have two moderators so that no one individual is unduly burdened.

What are your responsibilities as a forum moderator? In cooperation with the Director of Community and Editor in Chief, develop a written policy for your discussion forum. After the policy is written, delete any postings that don't fit the policy. If a discussion is lively and fun, it is okay to let it run for a week or so, but after that you will need either to delete the thread or to go into the thread and prune out the postings that won't be helpful to someone who lands on this page via a Google search three years from now.

You will be responsible for maintaining a productive tone and constructive environment at photo.net. Everything that readers post should be a sincere attempt to help other readers. You need to delete anything that is far off topic or an attack on another reader. Crud breeds crud. If Reader A sees off-topic or hostile content posted by Reader B, he assumes that this kind of content is acceptable and posts more. Consistent moderation reduces the need for moderation because readers know that off-topic or hostile content will be deleted and don't bother to post it.

Of what you see in the photo.net forum archives right now, probably nearly 50 percent should have been deleted immediately and 80 percent should have been deleted after a week. A handful of readers may complain about censorship, but really what you are doing is editing. With the current software, the only way that you can highly the most useful content is by deleting the less useful. What are we trying to achieve? Check out this thread on red filters. The original poster got a very good answer within less than one day. The six-photo grid by Daniel Taylor seems like the best answer. There is a follow-up question many years too late at the very bottom. A moderator should have deleted this, with email to the poster, explaining that nobody would see this unless posted as new (and suggesting the right forum; this one seems to have been discontinued in 2003).

We are going to be rewriting the photo.net discussion forum software soon and the new software will have a lot of features to make moderators' lives easier. For example, we will have "soft deletion". Less interesting postings will still be in the database, but they will require more clicks to access. This should cut down on the number of people who complain about their postings being deleted. It means, however, that someone [you] has to rate each each posting as being "worthy to present a year from now to a Google searcher", "worthy to be displayed prominently for a week and then fade into the background", "deserving to fade right now", or "deletable".

In order to have some authority with the readers, you ought to be able to answer personally at least 10 percent of the questions posed. If a reader doesn't get an adequate answer from the community, as the moderator it becomes your job to research the answer a little bit and post something responsive.

We anticipate that this job should require 15-30 minutes per day and can be done from anywhere in the world.

Please email a forum choice, your draft policy for that forum, and your resume (in plain text or HTML preferred, PDF is acceptable, Microsoft Word we can't read reliably) to philg@mit.edu, cc'd josh@photo.net, with a subject line of "photo.net forum moderator application".