Could you run your forum by yourself without any moderators?
Or do you have to have help?
Seriously consider this question. If you could never get help, could you take on the full task of running all aspects of your forum no matter how big it gets?
If yes, justify your answer. If no, tell us why you couldn't!
I just got rid of my only moderator, so yes I believe I'm capable. I also don't have much of a social life outside of my community, so I got a lot of time to dedicate to it.
With that being said. I do have friends I seek for advice if I need it. I often trust @Cpvr for his experience.
I have the best moderator you could have on Forum Squared. On my other sites I have dedicated staff that takes care of things. I went it alone when I first started. You find out pretty quick that it's an impossible task. People visit forums from all over the World so unless you can go with no sleep you need help.
I currently am just myself. Admin/moderator duties. I have a part-time mod, but honestly I know there may become a time where I have to fully delegate mod duties out to dedicated staff. But as new as my site currently is, I can see that need may be awhile.
I don't like having Moderators just for the sake of it personally, I'd rather wait until the forum needed a Moderator or two before hiring one. Whenever I've launched a forum, I've always done it myself. Hiring a Moderator doesn't come for me until there are 100+ posts being made daily on the forum and multiple active members.
The biggest forum I run, a football forum, had a significant staff team, consisting of 3 admins (including me), 5 Moderators and then various mini-mods who moderated certain categories or forums. This was at a point where we were getting thousands of posts a day. Up until the point I introduced a new feature which caused an explosion of signups and activity (prior to this point we were probably getting 150-200 posts a day from about 50 active members in total), the forum was managed by myself and my brother who had a Moderator account but probably only logged in twice a week. It was only the sudden explosion of activity (and a few minor associated problems with spammers/general idiots) that led me to hire some additional support staff, and the team did a great job. Rarely would a reported post take more than 2 hours to be reviewed.
If my forum got too big to the point where I couldn't be a moderator and Admin, I would definitely need more hands! As for being the sole staff I've done this on a few different forums. Right now I'm the only staff on a few of my forums, there's only two where I have additional staff. So the straight answer would be no I couldn't run a forum by myself if it got too big.
I've been running my forum mostly solo for the 6+ years it has been open. Though, I run a resource board where there's not a lot of posting activity because most people come here for the resources, support, and requests. I've been able to manage it alone quite well. I don't mind running a forum solo if I can handle it. If I had a forum with a lot of posting activity, I would probably prefer to have a "team" of people to help me run it.
