Have you been a forum administrator?

[jeremiah]

If you have/had your own forum, what have you learned about being a good administrator?

There's no such thing as a 'good administrator', at least not in my world. There are Fair admins, EgoManiac Admins, Lucky Admins, and Lazy Admins. I fall under Lazy, that's for sure.

I run/own about 8 forums and am admin on one of the largest webmaster forums online. My smallest forum, one that I have actually 'almost' given up on gets around 300 new members a day on average, thousands of posts daily, and has 30,000+ members now. I started it this year and it has been up and running for about 3months now. Kicker is, it's infested with spam, I'm talking 100's of thousands of posts, but then...it gets like 80,000+ uvs a month, so I've stopped complaining and learned to adapt.

What I have learned is, adapt or die. Once the spam started bombarding the forum, I had 3 choices:

1. hire mod help to handle spam
   
2. spend 18hours a day on there myself cleaning crap up
   
3. say to hell with it and figure out hot to monetize the insane amount of spam

As I'm the Lazy type, I went with 3. Now, site is earning me a little over 130 a day off adsense (on average) and some change off affiliate links.

(i might end up making a thread about how to earn off spam traffic one day on here, could prove to be a bit of an interesting/controversial little shindig)

ps. anyone interested in checking out the spam forum in question, pm me. will link you