Digital Spy, the UK's leading independent entertainment and media website, is searching for new people to join its Forum Support team.

About Digital Spy

Digital Spy is the 4th largest entertainment news website in the UK with in excess of 2.1 million unique users on its main Entertainment News site and 3.1 million on its Forum Network. The only larger properties in terms of audience in the UK are The Sun online, MSN Entertainment and BBC entertainment news (Source: Comscore, Jan 2008). The site registers over 80 million page impressions a month.

The accompanying forums (http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/) have over 250,000 registered users, over 22.7 million posts and rank as the sixth largest English language forums in the world by traffic (Source: Big-Boards.com).

About This Position
The successful candidate will:
- Provide timely support of excellent quality to Digital Spy's forum users
- Be enthusiastic about the subjects our forum members are discussing and be able to bring that enthusiasm and knowledge into decision-making processes
- Be able to identify not only if a post is potentially problematic but look at context and the surrounding discussion to determine the course of action that will yield the best result for ensuring that our forums remain the place for constructive, friendly discussion and interesting debate
- Be computer literate and be able to use our ticket-based forum management software to deal with alerts of potentially problematic posts and requests for support
- Have familiarised themselves with the content and ethos of Digital Spy’s forums. We have a diverse range of forums, ranging from showbiz gossip and Big Brother discussion to media and technology-oriented areas; in all of them, however, we encourage an atmosphere of constructive discussion absent from personal attacks and other off-topic remarks. However, you will need to be able to determine what constitutes a personal attack or disruptive remark and what is simply friendly, humourous banter between people who enjoy conversing online!

This is a part time job requiring around 10 hours per week with a degree of flexibility.

Additional work hours may be available over the summer months.

Your Skills
  • A good grasp of the English language is essential: impeccable usage of grammar, spelling and punctuation is a prerequisite to any application.
  • As this is a work from home position, all forum support activities take place remotely. You must therefore have access to (and provide for yourself) a high-speed internet connection.
  • This position requires strong critical thinking and analysis skills. Moderating a busy message board is about far more than receiving an objectionable message alert, removing it and penalising the relevant user: you will be required to carefully analyse messages and place them into a wider context before taking a course of action, should any be warranted.
  • Being able to suspend your own beliefs regarding any issue and be objective as possible is absolutely imperative. There will be occasions when discussions centre on emotive topics, and it will be essential for you to follow guidelines explained in both initial and ongoing training by Digital Spy management when dealing with such matters instead of allowing your own opinions to play any role whatsoever in your work.
  • Time management and prioritisation skills are essential: you will be working as part of a larger forum support team and with a live discussion environment, and will be expected to follow Digital Spy guidelines on how to maximise productivity.
Who should apply
This job is most suited to people with an analytical, legal, or technical background. A proven ability to work in groups is preferred; you will be part of a part-telecommute, part-office based team and your ability to communicate clearly with other team members and our forum members will be essential. Experience or knowledge of the use of Internet message boards is helpful but not a requirement: Digital Spy will provide ongoing training in this and other areas.

Our forum support staff takes a laissez-faire approach to moderation whenever possible: we prefer to deal with problems off the forums so that any interruption to constructive discussion is minimised. Moderators are prohibited from making any remarks on our forums not directly related to their forum support duties; as such, this is a job more suited to people keen to develop their analytical and teamwork skills than those who wish to exert power. The end goal is to ensure that our forum members are able to enjoy a friendly and interesting environment to discuss and debate a broad range of topics.

Application checklist
  1. Your contact details
  2. A recent CV
Send your application via email to jobFS0408@digitalspy.co.uk. Please use this address also for any application-related questions you may have.

If you are successful with the first stage of the application, you will be invited to participate in an interview and move on to the next stages of the application process.