Mar 13 2009
Volunteer Moderator Expectations
What You Can Expect of Us
1. I will give you as much technological assistance as WordPress allows. Namely, you will be able to use our comment search engine, edit comments and add HTML code to comments.
2. I will provide professional assistance as appropriate. For example, if your grammar is not quite at a professional level yet, we might create a list of tricky areas that you should watch out for.
3. I will write you a letter of recommendation, based on what I have seen of your work.
4. I will be patient, particularly given that this is probably the first time that you’ve ever had a job like this. Hell, this is the first time that I’ve ever had a job like this. When I started this website, it was frighteningly incompetent and amateurish. As time progressed, we got smoother and learned more about what worked and what didn’t.
What We Expect of You
1. The most important thing is that you are consistently welcoming and respectful. Please be especially accommodating of newcomers that aren’t that used to how we do things here.
2. Please be graceful and tactful, particularly with regards to status and rank. Too many websites have fallen apart because the moderators and administrators are full of themselves.
2. Please be careful. Paying attention is obviously a crucial skill for a proofreader. (Did you notice that this item is incorrectly numbered?) Also, careful people tend to learn from their mistakes.
4. We’d like five hours per week of your time.
5. Have a fun time with this. That’s an order! 
A Few Details About Our Business
For most of the past year, we received only around 15 comments a day. One full-time worker and one part-time worker could proofread and format everything. Over the last few months, our comment-traffic has grown tremendously. For example, this week we received about 125-150 comments a day.
125-150 comments is not very much work for a team of 2 editors and 3-6 volunteer moderators. So I expect that work will be fairly calm for the next month or so. But bear in mind that summer break in the US starts in two or three months. If students have more time, they will write more comments. Last year, the average visitor wrote nearly twice as many comments in August and July as he did in April or September. I project that we’ll see about a thousand comments on a typical August day. I’d rather train you while things are relatively calm than during the summer tsunami.
Yeah, I did notice the incorrect numbering! Haha. I was in the middle of writing a comment about it when I thought I should give it a second look. After all, it seems like too much of a coincidence for there to be such a simple mistake on an article about moderator expectations!