So... What now? Stories about sudden site closures

[snowbird 4]

I've had a few instances when sites closed very suddenly, and I always like hearing the horror stories that led people to close, or what they did after crazy admins closed their sites. 

I had an instance that the admin of a batman site was talking to me about being stressed, and he was like "should I close?" and I was like "What!?" then suddenly the site was closed and he was like "Wow, thanks, that really helped! and I was still sitting there being like "Where did this come from!?" people messaged me for like a week trying to figure out what happened. 

I had another instance where I went outside for a walk, then came back for a walk and the site was just GONE no one knew what happened, there were some rumors as to what happened but none of them made sense. 

The third was most recently, where admins decided to close their site because of 'rl issues' the next day they rebuilt and reopened... not inviting a single soul back... It was nuts. They actually banned everyone. 

Anyone have a story about a sudden site closing that rocked your socks?

[sohvi 22]

I was in the process of joining a site last autumn. Not on discord yet, hadn't registered, but was working on getting the profile of an existing character to fit the site's app.

 

The admin is all over site requests everywhere and advertising like crazy, and there is some activity on the forum, new people and characters coming in a consistent stream. The site gets a new skin, one of those fancy paid ones - and few days later, the forum is turned offline. I try their discord link, but it is a dead end. I check back for a week or two, but nothing. I checked again when writing this, and the site is still offline.

 

Baffles me to this day, and I would love to know what happened. My selfish brain is convinced  that if I'd joined a bit quicker, the site would have stayed up.

[Jaxx 317]

A friend invited me to join a site with them. The community was a bit quiet OOC, but quite active as far as posts, so I was happy to be there. And then about two hours after I joined, the admins announced that they were closing the site, and the Discord was deleted and the board was offline about an hour after that. They claimed that they were a married couple who had just found out they were going to have a baby but it still strikes me as weird that they dropped everything so quickly. I wasn't integrated into the community yet, but the friend who had invited me said that they received multiple messages from people asking what was going on, as many of the members didn't have time to see the announcement before the Discord was gone. 

 

Another time, the head admin put the board offline and announced the site would be closing. This was met with immediate and vocal opposition from the rest of the staff, as well as members, but to no avail. Admin said they no longer had the time or interest to continue staffing. One of the mods found out that the admin opened a different site a few weeks later without telling anyone from the old site. Since the members were all still in touch, it wasn't long before everyone knew and was fairly pissed off. 

 

A third time, the board didn't actually close, the admin just went nuts. Long story short, I was well within activity rules but the admin was being rude about my posting speed and telling me to be more active. When I told them that I'd prefer to handle any staff matters in private, rather than in the public Discord, the admin came into my DMs and was generally aggressive and rude. When I politely pointed out that her behavior seemed a little unfair to me, she banned me and seven other people who had nothing to do with the situation. Four were members, two were newbies, and one was a guest who hadn't even written an app yet. None of them were told why. Admin put the board offline with a note that registered members would still be able to see it, and deleted the site ads on directories stating that they'd become private. One group DM later, and the eight of us realized that the admin kicked out everyone who didn't worship her, and contact with people still on the site revealed that the admin claimed we'd all either quit on our own or attacked her and been banned. We were baffled but generally relieved to be free of such a psycho. Sometimes I still wonder how long it took her to turn on the remaining members. 

[Eleutherian 17]

I've always wondered why people don't just pass on sites if they're going to shut them down... let someone else run it if you don't want to so they can keep writing.  

I've had a few sites just fall off... who knows what happened to them.  They seemed like amazing places to write..really active or getting off to a really great start and then for whatever reason the admin or staff just disappears and then it just... fizzles off.  No one stays interested for very long.  

[Anonymous 234]

Yeah. It's always wonderful when they close sites and restart a new one with almost the same genre but then fail to tell players that have stuck with the site (and the admin) through a few years -and things.

Anonymous poster hash: 98e3a...afc

[archaeon 14]

On 2/27/2020 at 8:33 AM, Eleutherian said:

I've always wondered why people don't just pass on sites if they're going to shut them down... let someone else run it if you don't want to so they can keep writing.  

I've had a few sites just fall off... who knows what happened to them.  They seemed like amazing places to write..really active or getting off to a really great start and then for whatever reason the admin or staff just disappears and then it just... fizzles off.  No one stays interested for very long.  

 

I've often wondered about this. With original sites I can sort of see that some people might not want to hand their world over to someone else. I'd personally would have mixed feelings. But there are so many scenarios where it'd just make sense.

 

I think in some ways it's almost sadder when things just peter out. A slow death of a site simply because the original creator has moved on. Especially when the rest of the community is still there and nothing else has changed. 

Edited February 28, 2020 by archaeon

[rogue_kiss 3]

This example isn't a sudden closing, per se, but...

 

Over a decade ago, a RP site that I'd been a part of for a handful of months was having some serious issues with spammers and hackers -- and because the Admin vanished without a word to anyone (and just so happened to be the only person with access to the Admin CP), no one else had the capability of fending the spammers and hackers off. No one could do anything, really, except post -- which was fine for a while, but then the membership began to seriously dwindle, and soon there was virtually no one posting (save for the spammers and hackers), and the site got so trashed.

 

It was awfully frustrating.

 

A group of us decided that enough was enough, and that there seemed to be enough of us still around that if we were to build a new site and take our characters and threads over there, that we might actually get the RP to flourish again.

 

So, that's what we did. And that site lasted about another 7 years.

 

For us, it was the right thing to do, and I regret nothing!

 

Best of luck to you! ❤️

Edited February 28, 2020 by rogue_kiss

[Liv 13]

I saw it happen a couple of times. The first time, the admin decided that since she was no longer being worshipped and coddled, we could all go and kick rocks. Another time, a problematic member aggravated the admin beyond the point of no return and she shut the whole thing down on a whim (said member had been banned several times but somehow always found a way around it). Yet another time the admin just got bored with the time period, even though the site was flourishing and the community was really great, and closed it with no warning only to redirect members to their new site within the same fandom but in another time period.

 

That last one was the saddest for me, the site was doing so well and everybody was having fun, and there were other staff members that could have taken over... but nope.

[Naboo 5]

The most bizarre one was a few years back. Got onto a site that had just opened, lots of advertising was going on, activity was picking up and people were joining it and enjoying it. However for the admin they felt there wasn't "enough activity" for the member base it had and didn't like that there wasn't at least one post every hour of the day, and closed the site down. It was a shame, because it was off to an amazing start, and I can't understand the logic behind that closing to this day.

[xexes 108]

There is a certain serial site creator in a certain genre that is infamous for creating new sites that look SO great, but then closes the site without warning within 2 weeks or 4 months to the site opening.

 

It has gotten so bad that whenever any new site in this genre appears, the cbox/discord is littered with "Is this PersonXYZ's site?" so that they can avoid another heartbreak. This person has said before that these sites are theirs, they made them, so why should anyone care if they close them?

 

It gets worse.

 

Now, this genre is similar to a few others and each has its own separate pool of players. The other similar genres are all doing fine and everything is normal. But this genre? It's nearly completely dead. This one person has contributed in a major way to the death of the entire genre.

And the rest of the death of the genre? There's always that one over-competitive site that seeks to destroy its competition.

Hopefully time will balance out all things and this genre will return to its normal population.

[Huskerdust 625]

On 2/27/2020 at 12:33 AM, Eleutherian said:

I've always wondered why people don't just pass on sites if they're going to shut them down... let someone else run it if you don't want to so they can keep writing.  

I've had a few sites just fall off... who knows what happened to them.  They seemed like amazing places to write..really active or getting off to a really great start and then for whatever reason the admin or staff just disappears and then it just... fizzles off.  No one stays interested for very long.  

I have tried this multiple times. It doesn’t work. 

[Prophetess 137]

I have closed older sites (mostly chatrooms) once I've gotten to the point where I couldn't continue them because of real life coming first. Though I always made sure to give everyone enough time to get what was theirs or find a place to move on to. I even suggested places. Currently, I have no plans to close.

 

On the other hand, I was victim to a serial creator/closer but this was a while back. Site opens, doing good. Has folks joining and beginning to write. Doesn't last more than a month or two because Admin was steamed that everyone was coming to me with questions, plots, ideas, and etc. I got a quick message they were closing down and gave no warning. It was so sudden that it was there and gone in an about an hour. After that I built my site and when I see them I have no ill will. I mostly feel bad for the folks that will join the newest site of the moment until it closes. Having been the brunt of it before, I can't see doing that even if I had thoughts of closing. (Not happening.)

[JuliLouWho 1]

This is my confession I suppose. I had a very active board. It was thriving. I was a stay at home mom at the time but then me and my ex broke up. I had to get a job and I just slowly, very slowly stopped giving the board the attention that it needed. I did have one very amazing, active admin. He did keep the board alive but after I had just basically ghosted the board, it wasn't thriving the same. One day when I felt as though I could finally give the board the time it needed my admin and I revamped the entire board. I let him have a lot of say in any of the changes I was making as he had kept the board afloat in my absence. During the revamp we were speaking regularly, and we were exited to reopen because the board was like 3 years old at the time. Then one day, he just vanished and I never reopened the board. The board is still around. No members but also isn't offline. 

[reznik 4]

I ran into a particular creator in a niche fandom who would open boards, get a bunch of members, and then just... disappear after about 2 weeks. Never any public OOC drama that I saw, there was always plenty of activity but people were still getting into their characters, and she (playing one of the main canons of course) would simply fall off the face of the earth and the site would die. Then she'd wait until after people left to finally put the board in offline mode.

 

She changed her OOC alias a couple of times, so she got me with this routine more than once...

[birdorcages 3]

Back in like, 2012-2013 I think...I remember being a part of this wonderful wild horse roleplay site. Made a lot of good friends over the years of being on it, then all of a sudden one day someone had gained access to the admin account and absolutely destroyed all of the coding on the forum, making it impossible to access any former threads unless you were on mobile. I think it was something personal against the admin of the site themselves, but I never really got the full story, or I don't really remember all the details.

 

Eventually they just ended up closing the site down and deleting everything. It's so sad knowing all of the characters I'd created were just lost to time. There are scraps of memories from that site here and there but I'll never be able to read the writing on those forums again.

 

I was able to keep in touch with other people from the site for a while, but they've all since vanished too...only one (my best friend from those days) is a Facebook friend now so at least I know they're doing okay.

Edited June 27, 2023 by birdorcages