: Will a forum work without moderators? I'm starting a forum site. Right now, its only me, so I won't have moderators. Will this be a chaos or it will work anyway? (My site is a discussion

@Lengel546

Probably the most extreme example of a non-moderated forum out there is 2channel (ni channeru in Japanese) at 2ch.net/.
If you're not familiar with 2channel, Google around and read up on it. It's an interesting experiment in non-moderated, completely anonymous Internet communication, but it's not been without a lot of controversy, lawsuits and police investigations. 4chan is probably the closest equivalent we have in the English speaking web.

The biggest example of self-moderated comments on the Internet has to be YouTube (barring channels that actively moderate or approve comments). I'm sure you're aware of what a cesspool YouTube comments can become.

If you don't mind a complete free-for-all with offensive comments and trolls galore, go with the 2channel or 4chan model. But if you want a forum that's going to deliver on-topic discussion in a civilized manner, you're going to need some human moderators in addition to self-moderation.

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@Kimberly868

I agree with the other answers - without some form of moderation you will have chaos.

By having a "flag post for attention" button you can automate the process somewhat. If the post receives "N" flags in total or "M" flags over a given time period then it gets deleted.

However, what you will need is to limit flags to one per user and that requires have registered users so you can store their flag status in the database. You can't use cookies as a) users can clear cookies or b) log in from a different machine and vote twice.

There will be cases where you want to remove content immediately so you will need a human being (or three) monitoring the flags.

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@Ogunnowo487

Depends on your definition of "working". Yes, you will get traffic. Yes, it will be chaos. If you don't care about the chaos, then it can work. Otherwise, you are going to run into trouble really quickly.

An even bigger problem is if you do allow the chaos for a while and try to reign it in later. When I worked for Reader's Digest, we had a very active forum for Taste of Home magazine (a cooking/recipe magazine) that had never been moderated in any way whatsoever. We redesigned the site, integrating the forum into the site more and they tried to bring in some full-time moderation. There was huge brush-back from the community, and it pretty much seems like they've mostly given up on moderation except for in the most offensive cases. You can go there to see the result. It isn't pretty. And this is a forum where the average user is a 50 year old woman. Imagine what would happen with a less subdued audience.

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