hyldig wrote: Oh yes every forum should have 1 or more moderators depending on size . Pindo You have no idea . Someone is needed to break up fights and contain riots . You have never considered that part a moderators job I think . Some actually only come to forums only to start fights . Moderators are very much needed indeed .
This is only a small part of what a forum mod does.
Every forum gets spammed by bots. Moderators are needed to sift through all the daily post and remove the spam. Believe me, some of those bots can be incredibly clever in hiding their advertisements in legit-seeming posts. This takes human brainpower and time.
Then there are reposts, bumps of old topics, posts to the wrong subforums, plain off-topic responses such as memes, layout-breaking images, etc. Most of a forum mod's daily work is mundane.
Breaking up fights is just a small part of moderating a forum. Most often, the people who get warnings believe they have done nothing wrong. Sending out those warnings is enough to make the toughest person nervous waiting for the PM reply. I can imagine that most mods will rather be sifting spam!
Most of the work is done behind the scenes. If it is done right, almost no forum members will notice it. All forums I have helped moderate has had a secret subforum where the mods discuss among themselves. Even the content of those places is usually mundane.