Thread: Staff who accidentally use their powers

Ever been staff on a site/forum and accidentally use your powers to delete or lock a thread (or anything)? Ever come across a staff member who accidentally used their powers on your forum?

Unfortunately, there's was one time I accidentally moved a thread to the wrong section......on my own forum. *chuckles* Oh I love our fails in life. Other than that, though, I've never deleted a thread by accident, or anything close to that. I have been on a few forums where people who were new to being a moderator accidentally deleted a few threads.

Yeah, it's happened a couple times, and on my forum too. In other forums, I was confused to see my threads disappearing. Turned out a mod had moved them all for accident. In my site, we sometimes make mistakes when moving threads to wrong sections.

Yes one of my mods has done this. It's nothing to get upset or angry about, it was just as you said, an accident and we're all human so we all make mistakes from time to time. :-)

I've moved threads into the wrong boards on accident but I've never accidentally deleted a thread, that would be bad.

Yes, it's especially common when they're new and not used to using the controls yet. I had one girl who, repeatedly over the course of a few days, edited out other people's posts and put her own words in their posts. She was so used to hitting the "reply" button or "quote" button in that area, that she would just hit the edit button instead....look over at something else while the page loaded (she was on a slow connection)....and then proceed to type when she'd see the box ready. Sometimes she'd deleted the part she thought was quoted...and other times, she'd just add her words right below as usual, but in that person's post.

Then, to make matters worse, she'd get frustrated sometimes and try to post the same thing again when she'd refresh the thread and see that her avatar/post wasn't there after all. It was a mess. As soon as we figured out what she was doing, though, she was much more careful and I don't think it happened again after the first few days.

Originally Posted by Jessi

Yes, it's especially common when they're new and not used to using the controls yet. I had one girl who, repeatedly over the course of a few days, edited out other people's posts and put her own words in their posts. She was so used to hitting the "reply" button or "quote" button in that area, that she would just hit the edit button instead....look over at something else while the page loaded (she was on a slow connection)....and then proceed to type when she'd see the box ready. Sometimes she'd deleted the part she thought was quoted...and other times, she'd just add her words right below as usual, but in that person's post.

Then, to make matters worse, she'd get frustrated sometimes and try to post the same thing again when she'd refresh the thread and see that her avatar/post wasn't there after all. It was a mess. As soon as we figured out what she was doing, though, she was much more careful and I don't think it happened again after the first few days.

Did you guys end up getting frustrated about it? Or were you understanding that she was new to the controls?

I usually let it slide if anyone makes some minor mistakes when first becoming a staff member, it's pretty normal to do at least a couple things wrong.

I can't re-call this happening, I've only "hired" staff who are active posters and understand how the forum works.