I thought members might find it interesting to hear a bit about what it is like to be a mod. I was asked to join the team in the summer of 2005. I was thrilled as, like many others ,I spent a lot of time here.
All the team help run HT voluntarily in our spare time( and on top of full time jobs). I had thought at the time of the joining that being a mod could be done in under an hour a day. Boy, was I wrong and I know the rest of the mods will laugh at the thought of one hour being enough!
My full time job( and often weekend one!) is a teacher. I first come on to HT at about 6.15 am and will spend about half an hour looking through the nights posts. When I come home from school I will immediately come on here and spend an hour before supper. The evenings vary but I will always be on a further hour at least, when I have too much school work to do, and usually a LOT longer. I can easily spend 4 hours modding in a day( on top of my job) and it can be longer when I'm not teaching.
Our main job is to make sure the posts stick to our T&Cs. There are good reasons why we have T&Cs. We don't enforce them to stop everyones fun- honestly! We have to be very careful with any copyright issues for instance. We also have visually impaired members who find it almost impossible to decipher text speak and so we ask members to respect this( not a popular thing to enforce sometimes ). We get a lot of spam posts advertising that we delete as soon as we see them. We also as mods and admins have to make other decisions which can make us very unpopular. I have several times had to step in to sort things out and had to take the flak afterwards from irrate members. But we learn to take the good with the bad. And 99% of the time I can honestly say we have absolutely brilliant members which make modding a pleasure.
Where we have potential problems the team spend a long time discussing the way forward from them. We also like to look at ways of improving HT.

A good bit of time can be spent making sure we add hotels to our reviews which have been requested. We have to research those hotels on the web first to find if they have their own website, or to find the TO who is offering them. I also spend a fair bit of time on PMs helping with any queries members may have about how to use the site. Where someone asks for info I know we already have I go onto the search function and find it for them. Sometimes this means merging topics. But - this means that members can access all the information easily. For instance, if there were no merging, I would have 200 threads on the Marinha Dourada hotel in Goa
I have 6 forums of my own to mod and we also have forums that have no designated mod so we mod them jointly( have to admit that other mods/admin are better at this than I am, as i can struggle with the forums I have ) We also have to cover when any of the team are on holiday( and we DO like our holidays )
And of course- I like to be a normal member and take part in the forums myself.
Admin have all this and a lot more to do!
Obviously I only mod as I enjoy it and love HT. If HT were to disappear I would really miss all the great members we have, and the team. I didn't post this looking for any sympathy- after all if I didn't like it I can give up my mod job and go back to being a member. I just remember not really having any clue as to what a mod did when I took on the job, and thought members might enjoy hearing about it.