A Day in the Life of a Moderator

What does it take to maintain a site like YT? Like I said in an earlier blog entry, the day starts at 5:30 with content review. There are an amazing number of places on the site where visitor comments or messages can be entered. For example, in addition to the discussion forums there are photo comments, classified and photo ads, the guest book, tractor town mini-sites, etc. Content entered into these areas are reviewed for appropriateness.

Beyond virtual fist fights in the forums which I have already mentioned, the 13+ photo galleries can get some pretty dicey comments. For example, if a photo has a female in it, whether it's your mother, your daughter or your wife, inadvertently someone will make a sexual comment about it which doesn't pass the Yesterday's Tractors website morality meter test. We also occasionally get people who post pornographic pictures in the tractor galleries which causes instantaneous combustion of the site's morality meter. (Don't worry, I've got a whole box of them :)

Another thing that concerns me is when people post comments about a photo that is simply unkind. For example, someone posts a photo of a tractor they just spent 6 months restoring. Someone may enter a comment like "That's the worst %&*$?@ paint job I've ever seen." or "Why did you bother? Go get a real tractor!". Sorry, but I don't consider those comments considerate or constructive. I may be old fashioned but I took my Grandma's words to heart (God Rest Her Soul) when she said, "If you can't say something nice, don't say it at all.". I just think there is a constructive way to get a point across and some comments are just plain unnecessary. Take your anger elsewhere, please.

I suppose it wouldn't be so much work maintaining the website content if I wasn't so picky about keeping the site neighborly and above board. But I DO care, and I wouldn't know how to begin to look the other way when these things happen. Here is a list of the monitoring activities that begin at 5:30. It can take up to 2 hours to complete, depending upon what I find:

Classifieds: Approve dealer or featured photo ads and publish, review existing photo ads and remove non-tractor items, approve regular classified ads that got caught in the filter and approve, review existing classified ads in five different ad areas (we get a lot of spam attempts here).

Forums: Review posts that have been flagged, scan through new posts (usually about 1200 per day in 28 different forums) for problems, spammers, scams or concerns, then do the same for the KountryLife.com forums, the Truck forum and the Today's Tractors forum. Answer questions in the Site Comments forum as needed.

Photo Galleries: Review photos for appropriateness. Besides what I already mentioned about pornographic pictures, sometimes there are just simple mistakes like putting a new tractor in the "Vintage Photos" gallery, or placing a photo of yourself plowing in the "Vintage Ads" gallery. Review photo comments.

Spam: Review the Safemail logs for spammers and scams like these. This has been a huge effort but a lot of people have been hurt by scams so I take trying to keep them away from the site very seriously. I'm happy to say we're seeing less and less of these at YT and I like to think they've given up due to our vigilant attempts to block them and our buyers / sellers ignorning them.

Miscellaneous: Review article comments, chat room problems, TractorShed.com photo comments, regular guestbook and Tractor Town guestbook comments.

Links: Review and approve new links submitted to TractorLinks.com

Visitor Supplied Content: Review stories entered into "Your Stories", Collector Profiles, plus KL's "How-To DB", the Humor DB, Memories DB and Recipe DB.

Well I'm sure I forgot a thing or two but that gives you a good idea of how the day starts at 5:30 am. When I'm done, I wake my son up for school and get his day started. Then onto the YT Warehouse as required to manage the retail side of things (that's another blog entry in itself). There is also time spent fixing broken programs, server performance, adding new features, etc, which will also be covered in another blog entry.

The site monitoring is repeated two more times during the day, usually in the afternoon and then again in the evening. Thank goodness for laptops and wireless networks!