More moderation needed

It luckily doesn't happen too regularly, but there are times when there are offensive posts on these forums. However, the time it takes to respond to these things is in my opinion way too long. I've reported some post that was clearly offensive and I see that there has been no action taken even 15 hours after the post was made. Every forum on the web has quite a few moderators. The chess.com forums seem to be an exception. You need to change that.

Reports go to support. Their average response time is at least a day.

Moderators try to keep up with things in the forum but there are thousands of posts every day.

If a forum has thousands of posts every day, that means you need more mods. And whether reports go to support or whether moderators can see them too frankly is of no interest. If this is  a family friendly forum there needs to be much better and more active moderation. Offensive posts can't be allowed to hang around for 15 hours. And it's not like it's impossible, cause there are news sites with more posts every day that also get moderated actively.

Most moderators are only volunteers. In order to cover every content area, the site would need a lot of paid moderators, over multiple time zones and for multiple languages. I probably see less than a percent of the content on site, and as a volunteer, moderate when I have time to dedicate to it. 

Pretty sure the site doesn't pull in enough income to cover the number of moderators it would take to moderate the amount of content, and even then would likely miss things. 

I've been a volunteer moderator for an online MMORPG game for some time. We had access to the reports concerning the forums and thus were able to deal with reported offensive posts quite quickly.  Nobody can expect from a volunteer moderator to check each and every post in their free time. 

The problem here on Chess.com seems to be that there is no separate report function for the forums only.  

Having more  mods would certainly help. How many are there anyway? Only three come to my mind. 

But if it's true what @notmtwain said, only staff members can see the reports, that's a dumb way of handling it. If you, as a company, recruit volunteers who are helping you out in their free time you have at least give them the tools to do their job properly. 

(No offence meant here against the current mods,  you're doing fine under these circumstances!)

I can understand that the company can't have volunteers access to reports about cheating and stuff which is related to sensitive data. A technical solution would be to separate those reports. I don't know how difficult it is to revamp the reporting system accordingly, but I know that it's doable because I've seen it. 

With a change of the reporting technology the company doesn't need to hire more staff. Just channelling the reports to volunteer moderators would do the trick. And I'm sure there are plenty of trustworthy persons here who would gladly help out with moderating the forums which costs the company nothing but a few hours of the hired staff to handle them.  

The site uses a ticket system that is separate from the site. I don't know how it's licensed, but they likely have to pay for every support member and would have to train moderators to use it. It's likely not cost effective.

If the site hands out assignments, then the moderators wouldn't really be classified as volunteers. Most mods, as far as I'm aware, only moderate when they have time to do it, since they aren't paid. Not all do forums either. 

You're only guessing here. It would be most uncommon for such kind of software to pay for each staff member separately. Usually that comes with a bundle. And you don't know how certain privileges can be handled in that system.  

On the other hand, this forum software has probably a reporting system by its own which they could implement. Now it's me who's guessing, but it would be odd if it hadn't. 

Be it as it may, I still think it's a good idea to separate  forum tickets from the rest of the stuff.

I don't understand, checking the tickets would be voluntarily as well, not anything other than editing posts containing links to cheating sites or offences. It would be simply a tool for improving the communication between the community and the forum mods.

I'm not guessing they use outside software for the ticketing system, and I work in enterprise IT and know that a lot of software (especially hosted) has a per seat licensing model, where a company has to pay for each user that accesses the system. I haven't specifically researched the company I believe they still use, to see if that's the type of license they offer.

While it's possible they have an unlimited license, I'm making an educated guess.  edit: I just looked at a popular company and they have different tiers and every tier has a per user cost per month, with higher cost per user for more feature rich options (and the lower cost options are limited in how many users)

Regarding the forums, I don't think it is licensed, but based on an open source product and modified to do things they want. That's just my recollection based on looking at some page source in the past.

While some moderators would likely still be willing to voluntarily look at reports of inappropriate posts/topics and moderate accordingly, it seems to me that aligns more with scheduled type tasks and something that would be for those being compensated.

But that's just my thoughts. I know I perform moderation in the normal process of just reading the forums, as time permits.

Okay, my experience in this area is 10 years old, so your guesses are certainly better than mine. I didn't want to dispute your knowledge of them having external software for their ticketing system, but only your estimation how this works and what they can do with it. 

Sorry for that misunderstanding, I trust you're better informed than me. 

Right, now I know where you coming from. We didn't see it that way. We just wanted to help out to make the forums a better place. It was a much more hostile environment compared to this forums. The ticketing system was a great help for us to fight that hostility. 

That's not the case here, not by far. But I think it would be a good idea to have a a direct contact to you forum moderators if something goes wrong in a thread. 

ok here is a suggestion and i do not know whether it is actually possible 

moderate ourselves , ie , if you see an offensive post in forums , copy paste it to a specifically set up forum , however to prevent it becoming a place where everyone can view offensive posts in one place to get their daily lulz make it viewable by official moderators only  , the bit which might be impossible to do , but perhaps it isnt 

this will give the moderators a one stop place to catch up on what they might have missed , 

Yes, that is not a bad suggestion at all! We had in practice a thread  called "Report Forum Issues Here" or something like that. All the posts in that thread were hidden from regular users, only moderators could see and edit them. 

We used as a kind of internal communication as well. Like when someone reported an issue I wanted to take care of I've left a note like [I'm on to it, ~Spielkalb]. So the next moderator knew he didn't have to bother with that. 

There should be a button 'report this post'.
Moderators could prioritize to look at posts reported more.

Exactly. That's what I meant by saying to separate forum reports from other issues. 

looks like we are heading towards the same page here on this issue , im glad such a thing has been done before it shows it can be again ,