Aaah, yes, that question the mailboy in your company asks you innocently. That question that a supervisor asks you, and you just wanna smack him.
Beyond the publicly visible side of Modship (i.e. popping into threads to make sure the mudslinging isn’t getting too rough, moving threads, etc. . .), what do you do with threads?
Since my posts appear near-realtime onto threads, I assume that you don’t queue up posts to proofread them or deny them. Is there some little box that you click on to indicate ‘Yep! I read it. He’s OK!’. But there’s got to be more than that, unless I’m simply misguided. Is there a statement-of-work or job description you have to read and sign under? Is there a li’l blurb in the local papers looking for help from the want-ads?
The board could be set up so that each post would have to be approved before it is publicly available, but given the high volume of posting and the lack of paid moderators, it would be unfeasible to implement that feature at the SDMB.
A set of guidelines is sent to people who join the staff. There is also a probation period and on-the-job training. And of course the perks! But the confidentiality agreement prevents me from revealing what those are.
I imagine they read all (or nearly all) the posts in a given forum, paying particular attention to some topics (gravity bongs in GQ, abortion in GD, bannedfests in The Pit) that are known to bring the nuts out of the scrotum, so to speak. Then they do what they deem is needed to maintain this message board.
I guess I’ll add the obligatory Flaming Freemason Illuminati (So Mote It Be) Monkey reference here. It seems to make them so happy:
Then, when the day is over, they set aside a certain time to sacrafice pit threads, Tug-Ahoys, and pieces of Bo Diddley’s undies to Flaming Freemason Illuminati Monkeys as they seig heil pictures of Stalin and play La International to a picture of Hitler.
Wow, Tripler,you have been here two years already, who knows, you might be asked to
join their secret society sometime. I moderate a UBB board with around 76,000 members
& most of our time is spent deleting messages, warning users, putting messages in the
right forum, Etc. We don’t get any instructions–but we have a few super secret forums
of our own, visible only to us, which we use to manage users & forums.
Basicially I just learn it reading what UBB board instructs mods to do.
Goddammit, now the CK Dexter Haven and the Eutychus programs are going haywire, making explicit references to Rules 42(b)(vii)(2) and 42(b)(vii)(1) when Rule 42(b)(vii)(0.447.999.123.456) explicitly forbids it.
I’m just going to have to format their drives and reinstall the Moderator program… dammit, when is vB going to release the Mod 3.0 update patch?
