Brett_Tabke - 10:22 pm on Aug 22, 2002 (gmt 0)

Ok, mega interesting input - just excellent - thank you.

Let me lay out some more info.

a) Pre-moderation. All threads would require moderator approval before public posting.

That is all "threads". That is just the topic starters and not replies. (Ummm, think slashdot).
We average around 50 new threads a day. The current mod/admin crew could handle that - no problem. The response time would surprise you. We'd shoot for under 10 mins and probably hit 15-60 seconds during the day (no I'm not kidding). That would be faster than a possible upcoming load sharing system we are looking at.

b) Voting and public moderation.

I'm not all that fond of it from a users stand point, but it does have it's place in any discussion. Users would vote on a thread. Each vote would get a little "rank". You could then set your own level of "rank" and wouldn't see msgs that fall below X rank.

It's attractive from one big stand point: to turn it on, I have to click a radio button and press submit ;-)

c) Members only. All members would have to log in.

Benefit: potential to cut down on some noisy posts and slow down trouble makers cruising for spam/url drop potential.
Problem: shuts off public access and search engine referrals.

What makes up the difference in the loss of traffic?

It is a site killer to me. It's attractive in that it requires everyone to login, but I don't think it would solve most of the problem. People have to log in to post as it is now and that doesn't slow them down. We do have a large lurker base.

d) Subscription fee.

This one is more attractive than when we had this discussion last year. It solves the liability issues (those are huge) and keeps us influence free (it's clean). Once we take ads, we are beholding to someone and develop a relationship - it is often the same people we want to discuss freely.

Things that take time:

- Oil is right in that it doesn't take much time, but doesn't quite realize how much follow up work is required. The best track I have on it, is that every problem or edit spawns 3 stickies to follow up. There is a huge backlog of stuff that I have to take care of that few see. (login problem, sign up problems, pleas for help etc)

We also seem to get 1-2 a week that are on some crusade about something and won't let the topic go. I'm sure you can spot the recent ones that ended up involving an entire day to address and it's still not done.

Things that are not a problem:

- bandwidth and hosting.
We've had many offers of free hosting from 'roll your own server' to load shared systems. Thank you to the Members, Mods, and the hosting companies that have made open offers of servers.

- cash expenses.
WebmasterWorld is surprisingly cheap to operate. I'm sure if I separated out the little things like net access it would be significantly higher, but I just write most of that off as a biz expense anyway. Probably the biggest expense by far is mod phone calls. (Ever call London in the middle of the day? I suffer at&t sticker shock once a month)

- moderators
First class - what a crew. They are the standard bearer for moderation net wide. This is how it is done.