Hey guys, Our game is starting to take off and our community has grown to the point where the devs can no longer spend the necessary time to moderate the community. We run a kids site, so our overhead here is maybe more than most communities. We need someone to look through chat logs, watch forums, and respond to support emails. We've thought about deputizing some of our users, or placing ads for part time moderators at local colleges, and maybe posting to craigslist. However, I'm not sure that regular recruiting channels (Monster, LinkedIn, GameDev ads etc) are appropriate for hiring mods. Where do you guys find your (paid) moderators?

You could try posting at http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/forum.asp?forum_id=8 or at http://www.igda.org/Forums/forumdisplay.php?s=a30e84dff63bd9d70c135c93e1cb5763&forumid=63

(The Help Wanted forum here on gamedev, and the Bulletin Board at http://www.igda.org/Forums/)

Good luck

As you're dealing with kids, you might also want to look into whether your mods should have a criminal record background check to ensure they're not going to mess around with your users.

Even if that's not a legal requirement, it's something you could offer as an incentive to parents, so they can at least rest assured that they'll be leaving their kids in good hands.

Another point to check is whether your forum back-end is admin-friendly. Admin controls can be shockingly poorly implemented on some forums, so this is something to look into if you expect your community to be a busy one.