If they ever tell me I'll let you now............
GOOD answer! He's right... we're making this up as we go along. Consider it a social experiment.
Seven, eight or is it nine years ago I became the proud owner of the world's largest community of divers:
www.ScubaBoard.com. Wow. I was so excited, but there was a lot of chaos and we only had 2,000 or so users. So I came up with the concept of Advisors and moderators. Advisors were to help develop policy and also to help guide the moderators in doing their job. Unfortunately, an adversarial role developed between mods and users (and sometimes advisors) and I saw this as counterproductive to what we were trying to be accomplished. SO, a few years ago we enabled a major re-alignment of both the Advisor and Moderator staff and we began adding some support staff to help out. Our GOAL was for ScubaBoard to become THE friendliest place on the internet and not lose it's relevancy. It was tough demoting friends, and frankly some have never forgiven me, but the result was great... but not great enough.
So we have tried a few experiments to bridge the gap between staff and our users. Mods tend to be seen as peeps with power, and often well intentioned advice is seen as a demand rather than a suggestion. So the Advisors and I devised a group to be made up predominantly by gentle instructors who not only know diving, but who also know the ins and outs of social media and ScubaBoard in particular. Their mission is to make sure no question goes unanswered and that the Basic and New to Scuba forums are incredibly friendly and inviting for even the timid user to post a question.
Is it working? It sure seems to be. Hijacks in those two forums are at an all time low! Just think, if we had these guys around a couple of years ago, we probably wouldn't have a MOF LXI (or what ever iteration they are on now). But really, the answer lies with you, the user. Do YOU think it's working? We sincerely want to know!