Part 2 of the planning for your forums guide

[Rev 0.1, Requires Revision, please excuse any language mistakes]
Continuing on the Planning phase, we come to:
7-Team
Now, this is the vital and most critical part of your planning process. Your team determines and forecasts your early success or failure.
By Team I mean administrators, technical support, developers, designers, super moderators, moderators and news posters.
At start you won't have all those roles, it will be narrowed to just administrator(s) and moderators.
An administrator should have good knowledge of how to use, run and manage forums, understand how to make backups, fix user problems, create, edit and modify existing forums, add or remove roles and assign them to user groups and single users, as well as make occasional health checks on the system and check any exception or database mail errors.
**Administrator(s) is the one to decide when to upgrade, how to upgrade, when to take forums offline and how to notify people early enough, making the process as smooth as possible.
That role has to have enough knowledge about hosting, domain names, how to resolve and properly configure DNS, MX and other related records concerned with the service.
An administrator should also pickup statistics from host and from forum and provide reports to the owner/founder of the forum -which should be you.
This brings us to the founder role, you as a founder, will act as the God Father of all roles, you work side by side with the administrator, following up his decisions, noticing his learning curve and helping him with resources, you do the strategic planning, he implements your plans and vision.
Single or multiple administrators?
It depends on the following:
-The availability of your staff, if your administrator is available only 12 hours a day or so, you need more than one to work in a shift fashion.
-The knowledge and skills, you might need backup administrators, who can take over when something wrong happens and your basic administrator is unable to deal with the situation.
-The state your forum has reached, in terms of number of users, posts, categories, hosting costs, recovery costs, in general, the more famous your forum is, the more you need more professional staff working on it 24/7, supporting your users, adding new features and content, monitoring errors and resolving problems, managing moderators and making sure the content is clean and readable.
-How far will your administrators go, are they volunteering or asking for money, will they sell you and your users list anytime soon, exposing the privacy of your users and taking your content away, or are they faithful, they share your vision and dream, and consider your success theirs. Sometimes a number of administrators can cause a riot against you, they can simply split, taking everything and building a forum of their own, it is important to carefully choose your staff and keep them loyal.
**Moderator(s) are those who manage the content of each forum, their basic roles and responsibilities include:
-Moderation of posts, they have to follow the general guidelines in evaluating whether or not a post is against the forum policy or not.
-Initiation of topics, they can offline and online through talking to users in private or public start new hot topics that they know are of some interest to their users.
-Constant replies on posts related to the forum they moderate if addressed to them, they have to participate and debate making an example to other users, they also provide first line of support, answering users questions about how to use certain features of forum and guiding them to check the frequently asked questions or help sections.
-They recommend certain delegation or banning of users to administrators based on their posts nature and general reported complaints from other users.
-They usually prone or archive older posts, clean up their forums, reorder or merge related posts as well as stick certain posts or announcements.
A moderator should be an active poster, you can either choose him from the beginning, or wait and pick him up from your registered users.
You can decide whom to choose based on the quality of his posts, how dedicated he is to your forum, how friendly he is and whether or not he is liked and famous between other users, how many others did he invite or influence to come to your site and most important what are you ready to give him in terms of access privilege, the inner circle, sharing your plans with him, spreading rumors through him to users...etc.
Moderators are very important, they are your eyes and ears between the members, they feel and understand the nature of the users and what they actually need.
A good and healthy relationship with your moderators, means a successful forum, you will be able to know your users well, and to route to them your plans and future provisioned services.
It is important to have general criteria on how to choose your staff, for example:
-Make sure they have good writing skills and can express themselves as well as understand others.
-They have to be helpful, listen to others and know how to react in severe situations.
-They have to be respectful, respecting themselves, you and others.
-They can't be of the easy to get bored type, they have to have patience and wide scope.
-Choose the type that thinks before talking, that plans before implementing and reacts after situation has been properly assessed.
-Try to know what hidden agendas do they have, and will that agenda work with yours well or harm it.

That's it for this part, see you in the next one.