Our web site is staff-on-hire positions, as we are quality, professional and require the constant attention 24/7 in order to provide the quality, professional support our customers demand.

For this we therefor decided to hire staff and that is all handled very well through marketplace posting and advertisement. But this is not really public knowledge, we try to do this behind the curtains.

Nevertheless it is public knowledge as some people put one and one together, ok , not a big deal. But now we get monthly staff applications by teens who think they qualify for the job and despite an announcement that we are no longer looking they keep on applying.

We can ignore them, but are afraid it are also possible tests from potential customers to see how our company runs. Or competition trying to provoke whatever they have in mind and not replying might work against us. (Yes, we are a bit paranoid).

Another option is to have a default reply, but I am not sure how to do that as various means are used to apply (sendmessage.php, just normal email, privmsg, mail form from vbb).

Hopefully someone here has experience with this and/or a suggestion we could discuss.

We don't pay our staff (we can't afford to) but we do find ourselves in that very same position as you frequently, I suspect many admins do regardless of whether they pay their staff or not. It's probably more of a problem with sites that are not just a forum like ours which offers hosting.

I don't think there is a clear cut solution to the problem, if there is I'd like to know as well. I don't think ignoring them is the right way of going about it, for the reasons you state and also it's not nice. If you have a policy that you will not hire under-18s then put it down in writing somewhere, either in your site policies or put together a standard reply email in which you inform them politely that you have a policy that you won't hire under-18s.

You could also try telling them the truth, that you are not hiring. Employers commonly use this response if you contact them without them advertising a position. They'll probably tell you "Thank you for your application. Unfortunately we do not have any positions open at the moment but we will keep your details on file". You're not promising them a position and you're telling them the truth at the same time (and it's a default reply so everyone gets the same message).

It's tricky I know. We've got a bit of a problem with a kid at the moment. He's been hanging around for months and has been bombarding both me and the other admins with requests to join the administration team...... not the forum administration team, he wants to be a server admin! And he's not even a VIP member in the forum. :rolleyes: We just gave him the usual "sorry we don't need any more admins" line but we will be needing to add some more forum staff soon and we've got our eyes on members that are "newer" than he is. We're not quite sure how to deal with this situation.

I think the best is to simply decline their application request with the message your web site is not looking for new personal.

I had the same problem at my site for a while, till I wrote something in the rules of the forum.

- Do not ask to be a moderator. If we need more moderators, we will choose a person and offer the position to them. Asking to be a moderator will diminish your chances of obtaining that position.

and it seemed to work.