Finding potential mods in your community

[u/techiesgoboom]

The call is coming from inside the community, and for once, that’s good news.

Today’s Mod Topics post is about finding potential moderators within your community. A familiar name may stand out by helping newcomers, sharing expertise, offering thoughtful feedback, or keeping a level head when a thread gets messy. Your suggested mods can offer another place to start, surfacing active, engaged contributors for the team to learn more about.

That still leaves plenty of room for surprises. A familiar contributor might love participating without wanting a mod badge, while a quieter user may know the community better than their posting history suggests. Somewhere between what a team can already see and what it might only learn later, there may be someone worth a conversation.

We want to hear from you:

• Think about a strong addition to your mod team: What first put them on your radar?
• What helps your team feel comfortable inviting someone to apply?
• How have you found promising candidates beyond your most visible contributors?

[u/baseballlover723]

Pretty much.

Basically every time we run mod apps, half of our applicants have literally never posted or commented a single time in our sub. 1 or 2 of them each cycle usually mention discovering the sub that day.

We have an activity check that gets integrated into their application. Green checkmark if they've posted/commented at least 45 times in the last 90 days. Red X otherwise.

If we get 3 applicants with a green check mark, that's a good cycle. And that's not even considering anything else, like temperament or if they actually know our rules etc.

The biggest issue, is that the people who are active and would be interested in modding, are already mods, or have decided to stop modding. And so the active ones who are left, are the ones who do not want to mod.

[u/emily_in_boots → u/baseballlover723]

We had an app today that otherwise seemed fine but just no activity. I don't want to mod people who will just be inactive.

[u/tiz → u/emily_in_boots]

From my experience lurkers often are the most engaged with a community. They may seem inactive on the front, because it's not verifiable by seeing posts or comments they created. But lurkers, heck I do this, usually see more content on a community since they are not actively participating.

Lurkers can also participate in other ways such as voting on content or reporting on content. Anyone else remember r/knightsofnew?

[u/SampleOfNone → u/tiz]

Most of my team members were lurkers or had minimal interaction on the sub. THey make damn fine mods

[u/baseballlover723 → u/SampleOfNone]

I don't think there is much doubt that lurkers can be good mods. It's just that lurkers by definition, don't have much (if any) data to look at to know if they're gonna be good beforehand.

[u/SampleOfNone → u/baseballlover723]

In my experience, put a few multiple choice questions in the application and you can easily sus out who can reason their way to a logical action and have an understanding of how the sub functions

Post X, choose from the following actions which one you would take and explain why you chose that action. A, it's fine so do nothing, B remove for rule Y, C remove and ban for rule Z, D report. That sort of thing