One of the trickiest parts of running a forum is keeping an eye on things during off-hours. Spam bots always seem to strike in the middle of the night, and drama usually breaks out right when no admins or mods are online to calm things down.

Curious how you all handle coverage when you're away from your desk. Do you lean heavily on automated plugins, bring on staff from different time zones, or just hold new member posts in a queue until morning? Would love to know what tools or strategies have worked best for your community.

I lean heavily on @Midnight Gremlin’s 😛

Whenever I get Stop Forum spam alerts or reports from members, it takes me back to a situation a few years ago when someone posted adult content. We had to act quickly to remove it, report it to the ISP, and ban the member.

I think that the best way to handle moderation is to hire a moderator. This is one of the best things you could do in order to make sure that your forum runs smoothly. There are many admins who do not have enough time when it comes to paying attention to all the activities on the forum. This is where moderators could help.

Building a worldwide mod team. For example, I’m in UK and Gizmo is in NZ. He’s one of the moderators on my forum so effectively there is cover across the day.

If moderation needs to continue, it is highly recommended to have a second moderator for the forum to cover the shifts you aren't working—or even a third—because a single person can't handle it all. Even with alerts set up for when you aren't actively moderating, that person eventually needs to sleep; besides, there is nothing more annoying than having to check notifications every so often when you just want to enjoy your free time.

If there are no other moderators on the forum, then I would make sure that I perform my administrative duties adequately. I would create a schedule that would allow me to perform my duties at the right time. However, I would prefer to hire two or three moderators who could take care of the forum whenever I am away from the forum. This is a cool strategy.

There are 2 admins on our forum. The other admin is 6 hours ahead of me in the UK. By the time I get up, any attacks by spammers is usually dealt with by her. We both research new registrations and just be as vigilant as possible.

I wake up, realize I need to moderate and moderate whatever I need to when I wake up. I do not have any staff atm, I still need to set up an individual moderator / staff system to handle making mods for each section but as of now I’ll just ban/clear all posts for bots, and do whatever moderation I need elsewhere when I hop back on next.