Paying someone to manage and moderate a discussion board

How much do board managers charge?

[TomWaits]

We want to own a board but we don't have the time to manage it daily. Are there people who could be paid to manage an already existing, active discussion board?

If I were to, say, purchase an existing board that at peak times during the year hits 1,000 users online, and at non-peak hums around 350 online, and then asked someone to manage the server, all the details that go along with it, and moderate and deal with essentially everything that goes along with that, is it realistic that I could find such a person/company? The idea is to have this company deal with the bandwidth, too, so paying for them to handle everything. Just hand it off and say here, you deal with this.

Opinions? Am I dreaming?

[encyclo]

I'm sure it's doable, but there are a lot of issues to consider first. You're talking about a reasonably large forum which may not be able to be managed by one person alone, so the person would have to recruit and retain a moderator team to share some of the workload. Bandwidth cost is a problem area too: the person will need to have incentives to increase participation, but that would naturally increase bandwidth costs as pageviews go up: they would be financially penalized by a package deal as success actually reduces their profit margin.

Even with the appropriate technical skills, the person really needs strong knowledge in the subject matter covered by the forum, be a good team leader, have good judgement, relevant experience in managing a forum... As you mention buying an existing successful forum, you may find that the best person to run it would be the previous owner or a senior member/moderator.

I'm sure that others will come up with more ideas.

[AAnnAArchy]

For the right amount of money, some admins could probably be persuaded to learn about almost any subject. "What? It's a constipation board? Okay, send me all the information I'll need..." ;)

Although, why would anyone want to buy a board and then be almost completely hands off regarding the running of it?

[rogerd]

TomWaits, I don't doubt that you can find someone, at some price, willing to take on the full management of the forum. What you probably won't get is the passion that a true enthusiast would bring; most successful forums tend to have a hands-on founder and some passionate mods, all of whom are volunteers (at least for a long gestation period).

I guess that outsourcing wouldn't be a problem if the board is mainly functional, e.g., a software support forum. If you are trying to build a vibrant community, though, your selection process is likely to be more difficult.

A few questions to ask yourself (which may have implications for cost and difficulty of contracting with someone):

1) What do you hope the forum looks like in a year or two or three?
2) How well-moderated do you want the forum to be? E.g., most bad posts spotted within a few hours at most, or just periodic spam cleanup, etc.
3) Are volunteer mods likely to be recruitable, or will mod compensation be necessary? The more commercial the forum seems, the harder it will be to recruit free help.
4) What kind of posting volume do you expect? (Affects both system performance and level of moderation needed.)

<added>I'm not sure I like the idea of making the forum manager financially responsible for bandwidth. That might create a disincentive for them to grow the forum. Why build traffic if it's going to cost you? I'd view bandwidth growth as a measure of success (assuming you've designed light pages and don't allow files, images, and other bandwidth hogs).</added>