What is the forum policy on mods accepting business opportunities that are not available to members of the general public under the same circumstances?
The reason I ask is because a certain signature campaign is signature campaign is paying staff (mods) at the same rate that legendary members receive. From what I have seen is that most mods are only senior members, and the specific mods that are participating in this signature campaign are senior members.
On it's face, this does not sound like any problem, but if the mod is receiving a higher payment then is available to members of the general public in the same circumstances then the campaign operator may be able to exert undue influence over this/these mods.
The reason for my concern is that this post has a campaign operator denying payment to 9 members because they were banned during the payment term. The fact that a user is or was banned is not public information. AFAIK there is no publicly available way to know when a user is banned, nor the length of the ban (the length was also mentioned in the above post). I cannot say this for sure but it appears that the campaign operator is giving mods an above market rate for posting and is receiving information that is not generally available to the public.
Another concern is that a campaign operator could potentially use their influence to get a mod to ban a user who should not otherwise be banned because the campaign operator wants to save on advertising costs. According to this post any user who was banned during any part of the term will not be paid. The above post also says that staff members will be able to join the campaign at any time (no one else is able to join at this time). This post also says that staff members are able to receive a specific higher rate then senior members.
Does the forum have a policy on mods accepting these kind of opportunities? If it does not then I think mods should be prohibited from accepting these kinds of offers. The reason for this is to prevent potential conflicts of interest, or potential perceived conflicts of interest.
