How do people become mod?

[rabernet]

In answer to your question on how someone becomes a staff member.

When we decide that we need to bring on more staff, we start to look at current members here. We look for participation, location at times (there was a time we were needing more mods from the west coast to cover after the east coast mods hit the sack), we look at the quality of their posts (how helpful are they, how do they react when there are hot topics, like the recent events this week with a now banned member), we look at length of time they've been a member here - while it doesn't disqualify any one, we do tend to look at BP.net veterans first, but there have been members that didn't have veteran status yet that become a mod.

Then we come up with as many as 10 names and the staff discusses each candidate and what we each think that they can bring to the table, what their strengths are and also discuss any concerns that we may have, if any.

We then decide how many staff we plan to bring on - usually 2, but sometimes 3 at the same time and a poll is created that all the staff members vote on.

Once the top 2 or 3 candidates are identified, they then receive a PM from an Administrator offering them the position and explaining more about the position and what it involves. Not everyone accepts, it's a completely VOLUNTEER commitment, and it's definitely a special personality that can put on the green cape, and make difficult decisions at times (giving infractions to friends when they've earned one is one example - and being able to separate out personal from "business" can be a challenge for some people - heck, we all struggle with that when we really like someone, but we know we have to ding them).

Hope that answers your questions, and we thank you for your nomination.