Idea: Voluntary Forum Moderation

Ectar:   Moderators are people who work from home on a part-time basis, they are not support staff based in the Paris office. The role of moderators isn't to interact with and chat to players on our forums in an official capacity, that's the role of the Community Team who cover all of our products. We don't have specific community team members per product. I know some of you would prefer that but it would then mean the community department has a minimum of 42 members (assuming they work 12 hour shifts 7 days a week) purely just to provide 1 person per product, per language and doing nothing but forum posting (7 languages, 6 products).   Thinking along the lines of "hire more staff" isn't always the best solution. Sure it may help when there is a surge of stuff to work on, but when it dies down you then have a lot of staff with not much to do. It's a balance that any company and any service driven role is constantly trying to manage. Our forums are not the place to discuss this because in all honestly and fairness guys, you have no idea what's going on behind the scenes to counter that.   We accept that we can't be everywhere at once and we're not going to try to be.  As stated already this is why the Forum Contributor role has been introduced. These are players who are show to be level headed have a semi official presence and can also draw our attention to potential hot topics for a more official answer along with making us aware of something that perhaps needs hidden/removed until a moderator gets to it.    Additional people will be contacted very soon about this role and what it entails.