Forum Moderation

Then great, you must be the best or least busy forum on the Internet.

Basically Mods are needed when there is too much work for the Administrator to do alone, they typically look after particular sections of the forum and stop people being rude, delete spam, and generally keep things running smoothly.

If you have mods but don't know why, chances are that you don't need them yet, wait until you get a bit bigger before assigning mods anything else is just too top-heavy

I think that moderators are first and formost exemplary forum members. They're here to support the admins, help out the members, demonstrate responsible behaviour, and generally provide some personality on the site. In a new forum your mods will be needed to keep the conversation going, make sure questions get answered, and start discussions to keep the place active.

The secondary role of the moderator, as Jeeves suggested, is to enforce the regulations. Around here that means deleting a lot of spam We generally don't have problems with bad behaviour here but other forums do and moderators are responsible for keeping that under control as well.

Have you heard about The Admin Zone forums? I posted our moderator manual there last week, you might want to have a look at that.

I am worried due to my topic of my forums, and the fact that they may become roudy.

common sense goes a long way *and this coming from me :D*

If you're worried about bad behaviour the first thing you need to do is have your staff demonstrate the kind of attitude you want for your forums. If they are polite and respectful then the members will follow along. If anyone gets out of hand you and your moderators would have to step in. Sometimes just a warning is enough (Hey, lets keep things under control here). Other times you'll have to lock threads or PM problem users with a warning message (if you do that again you'll be banned etc.) Deleting posts may be necessary in extreme circumstancs.