The fact is, as you rightly state, people view the opinions of moderators and other staff members differently to those of other members. You need to remind your moderators of this and give them precise guidelines as to what kind of discussions you are happy for them to be involved in, and those they are to avoid.

Moderators should still share their own opinions and display their own personalities, but they need to be aware of the extra weight their voice can carry. In the example you mention, it may be worth the community manager advising moderators to clearly state that their opinions are their own – and not necessarily those of the community or administration as a whole.

It might even be useful to get the moderators to add something in their signatures to this effect.

I hope this helps.

How do you prevent this? Apart from having stricter guidelines for moderators?

A real example: Someone asked an opinion on Camping XYZ, and the first three posters were 3 moderators all slating it. Which is fair enough, it’s their personal view. However, The forum received criticism and negativity as other posters, who did like Camping site XYZ, took this as the “official” view of the community.

Would it not be good to have two different usernames – for instance “Steve” and “Steve – Mod” with all personal views and opinions being posted under the “Steve” account? Is it not easier then to spearate personal vs official view?

Also on the forum opening page the various section of the forum are listed as are the user names of the moderators assigned to the section. The front page of each section as the moderators listed at the bottom. We aren’t difficult to find.

It sounds like you have the right strategy, and are reaping the rewards of having a more open, transparent relationship with your members.

I have participated on a forum that operated by having moderators who were mod1 mod2 etc and those who were moderators had a separate user name that they used to post. The identities of the moderators were kept secret from those without “back room’ access. In my opinon, that was a disaster because members tended to get upset with the anonomous moderators since they had no way to know if it was a member that may have biases or not.

My more personal system has never resulted is too much turmoil, just the occasional civil disussion when a member does question a staff action. It is a lot harder to attack the actions of an admin/mod if you have had pleasant discussions with them in the past and have grown to trust their judgement.

It’s a good job the majority of your users were happy with the upgrade – failing to consult them before such a huge change always risks a backlash.

The conversion process should have went smoothly, if not for the phpMyadmin version I was using for my previous board software, as it didn’t have “compatibility mode”, and therefore there were duplicates that had to have a huge manual FIND and REPLACE done for. This was during the process of moving the database over to the same server the vBulletin installation was on (my paid server space, rather than that of my friend, who was hosting the forum for me until I got it), so that the upgrade can be made. Said problem wasn’t a big deal, and nothing was lost; it just took a lot of time (the forum was back up on vB within 48 hours after we (me and my friend, a fellow admin) started the process.

I’m glad I made the change. I already familiarized myself with vB before hand, so I knew what to expect. I was planning the upgrade for many months.

Reading your response to me in another post on your blog, I did agree that it would have been best to consult my members before making the upgrade. But fortunately, many of them were actually thrilled with the change, or just didn’t care either way. The most bitter reaction was a user who also runs a forum, but uses IPB. He said he thinks vB was a bad choice, but still leagues better than phpBB. There was another, not as bitter, just being confused about a few features (either that he could no longer find, or that he could now find). Me and some members were quick to help him out, and all his questions have been answered to his satisfaction.