Expanding on mprep's response. I had roughly 38k good reports at the time I was appointed a moderator of the Altcoin sections, as well as being made a patroller. I turned down the possibility of moderating another section, because I wanted to see how I'd cope. Well, to be honest even though I had a lot of good reports, and thought I had a very good understanding on the forums guidelines. I've found that I've learned quite a lot since being a moderator, and I am still learning to this very day. If you're trying to become a moderator without demonstrating that you understand the forum guidelines through reporting then you'd probably have a very difficult time. As a reporter what seemed a trivial thing to report is totally different coming from a moderators perspective as you need to really look into it. Where as a reporter would simply get a bad report.
Here's a few things I've learned from being a moderator;
- You'll be exposed to external links a lot more often, and will need to consider privacy, and security more than you did before. This is something that I'm currently addressing as we speak. Despite being a staff member for over a year now. I'm not talking about changing your password or password strength, but going as far as changing operating systems. I was a die hard fan of Slackware at first, then moved onto Ubuntu. Recently, I've been looking at securing my system with Qubes to allow isolation when dealing with reports. Well, not the only reason, but certainly a contributing factor.
- You've really got to read the discussion no matter how brain dead it might seem to you or how uninterested you might be. To be able to deal with a report its likely you'll have to get the context that it was posted under.
- I've been reading in depth about inspecting malware, and isolating it as best as you can. Looking at the fairy tale signs of malware when it isn't known to any anti virus database.
Although, I truly do love being a moderator, and contributing to the forum. It certainly isn't for everyone, its a lot of learning. Theymos, offers guidance when you've handled something wrong, and that's pretty much how you learn. Its very much a learning on the job type thing even with good fundamental understanding of the rules. My reporting effectively guide was written when I wasn't a moderator, and I could probably add onto that tenfold from my experience this past year, and I'm still no where near perfect. For example, I've learned that leaving reports unhandled is the best thing to do in certain scenarios where as before I used to assume that was bad, and you needed to handle as many as possible.
I think the barrier for becoming a moderator in the first place (although definitely not the only criteria) reporting a lot of posts definitely shows if you've got what it takes, because that can become a thankless task. I do remember though, and I will always remember this. Cyrus messaged me one day after busting a few accounts. He thanked me, and said to keep it up. I try, and do this to regular reporters to as I know that can sometimes be the difference in keeping this forum clean.
All of this learning has eaten into personal time, as well as time I could have been handling reports. Ultimately, I believe at the end it'll be worth it to handle reports more accurately so there's no cleaning up after me from theymos or any other moderator, but this is the sort of sacrifices all the moderators have done, and if you truly want to contribute to the forum through becoming a moderator then you've got to be willing to put in the often thankless task of reporting, and be prepared for a lot of learning ahead of you.
Us moderators never say no to more reporters though
For me, it is ridiculous (somewhat) to see a user with member rank becomes a moderator. I don't offend lower rank users but the rank and the total received merits (that in turn affects their current ranks) are some of good things to glance at their contributions. As being mentioned above by the others, another type of contributions and maybe the most important when admin looks at your application is your report history.
Conbitrutions, reports, trusted. Lack one of them or all of them, then there is no probability to become staffs.
AFAIK, the staff who began at low rank is Halab (one of the most recently hired staff, since 2018 maybe), from Full Member rank if I am correct.
It is true that fairly low ranked users have become staff members before. However, I'd assume that's through demonstrating their understanding of the forum guidelines, and work ethic through reporting.
