At the heart of any good community are the forum moderators. This rag tag band of warriors battle against the tides of spam, abuse and unclean language to keep the spirit of the board alive. So when you're selecting your moderators, it's important that you get suitable people for the job.

The job of a moderator
The internet is overrun with spammers. They flood our email inboxes, website mailing lists and unfortunately even the simple message board can fall victim to their evil clutches. They take every opportunity to promote their poor quality products. Without good moderation a board is overrun. One of my favourite MSN Groups fell victim to this.

There is also the problem of people. Being able to think for themselves people are very unpredictable. They can easily become aggressive and begin hurling foul language at other users. Sometimes even the more timid users need to be reminded who is boss.

This is where the moderators come in. When they see a comment that was hurtful, a plug for a website when it clearly says no spamming on the rules topic or where people are posting one word replies to get their post count up, a moderator is ready to step in and cut them down to size.

Why recruit moderators?
In a perfect world you would be able to moderate your entire forums yourself. Well actually in a perfect world, forums wouldn't need moderating but anyway, doing it yourself is best. As you can do it your way. However if you have thousands of posts per day you simply cannot read them all yourself. Moderators are needed.

Generally you should only recruit moderators when there is too much to handle yourself. Although you may notice that usually the top posters on a forum are moderators. This is no coincidence. Being promoted to a moderator is big motivator and if your forum is dieing, it might be worth a go.

What to look for
You don't want to be selecting anybody to be a moderator. After all there is no point appointing someone who is creating the bad posts that need moderating as they would consider everything acceptable.

The first thing you want to look for is users that are responsible. Ones who don't take every opportunity to insult others and plug their websites. You want users who help others. If you have a newbies introduce yourself board, see which users welcome the new members into the forums. The more kind and helpful they are, the better candidate they are.

You will also want to consider how often they visit the forums. If they only come on once a week they are not going to be a good moderator even if they are the most helpful person in the world. It's much better to have someone who is on a few times per day.

Conclusion
Picking a good moderator is a perceptive job. There is no guarantee the person you pick will be a good moderator so it's good to offer them a trial period. It's easer to get rid of them at the end of the trial period if you don't like them that way.

The important thing to remember is, will the moderator bring benefit to the forums? If you can handle the moderation yourself as you don't have many posts or users are simply responsible then you don't need moderators and so shouldn't recruit any. But if you need to loosen the workload then consider candidates deeply before recruiting.