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The Death of a Forum


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We have all experienced it. As forum owners some of us go through tons of ideas before we latch onto one that really takes ahold of us. We make forums, reach out to others, desperately try to grab for the attention our ideas, plots, stories, and forums need. Once we find that 'something' we cling to it and put our absolute everything and all inside. We spend hours writing guides, advertising, showing people our shiny new site, making graphics and adjusting skins. We spend hours RPing so it looks active, posting like a mad person in a wild attempt to draw attention.

 

However, sometimes no matter what we do it just isn't enough. People don't bite it, they don't RP, and they don't come in droves like we had been desperately hoping, or thinking, they would. Instead we end up being the only active person, posting to no one, and advertising back to back with little to no results. When do you call it? When has it been dead enough to lay them gently to rest? Do you keep chugging along despite this, or do you finally bite the bullet and realize the dream of a plotline has simply drifted away?

 

When it does die, and you've finally accepted it, what do you do? Do you just drop the whole thing and walk away from forum ownership, or do you try again? What has been your experience here?

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You call it when you aren't enjoying it anymore. Sometimes that's hard to realize and even harder to admit, but at the end of the day this is your hobby. You need to enjoy it. If you aren't, then focus on something that you do enjoy.

 

I've walked away from a few games over the years, and sometimes I need to just take a break from everything, and sometimes I jumped right into something different. It really depends on what took the fun away in the first place, and how long it took me to admit I needed to walk away.

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Oooh! I'm interested to see what everyone says!

 

I've never left an active site. I'm not sure if I'm abnormal or something, but every site I've ever joined I hang on until it completely closes (By closes I mean the admin stop paying for the page, or I'm literally the only one left as a player). 

 

As an admin - as long as I'm not alone I would keep a site. Playing with at least one other person is worth it for me, because people could come at any time! I can't say I've ever just quit something! In the past I've had to close sites due to drama, and reopen them privately, but that's not the same as lack of interest.

 

The last few months I've had only two other active users (three if I include myself) and I never felt like the site was dying. It's just taking an extended nap, like an over-fed and under-worked house-cat or something. I've never considered giving up since I've become Admin, but like I said - as long as I'm not alone, it doesn't bother me. I'm not sure I would ever know if something was dead as long as at least one of my friends cared about it. I end up posting mostly for myself anyways. xD

 

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Like @Death Kitten said - when it stops being fun.

 

This day an age, if I give up on a board, I'll wait before starting a new one.  A few years ago, I was more eager to jump into something else.  But at the same time, it was oftentimes my lack of dedication that the board died to begin with, so it comes as no surprise that I'd just grab ahold of something new and shiny and go.

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For me, a site dies when you have no motivation left. It's become a job to keep it open instead of a hobby. You're working so hard that the benefits are no longer worth it. And when you reach the point where you question if you're going to even get anything out of it anymore. 

 

Like @Death Kitten said, it can sometimes be hard to realize this. But when the emotional toll gets too high, that's when I close a site. And it's really sad, but also kind of cathartic to move on.

 

If this happens, I usually take time to join other casual games. Nothing serious, just something I can float in and out of while my muse recovers. Something to keep with my writing, but not to tax me too much. That way, I can build myself up for something new and exciting.

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I just thought of this! (I'm not sure why I didn't sooner) but you can always give up admin status to another player or players. I never considered that there would be an emotional toll or that you would feel like you were posting for nothing. If there is still an interest and players and you don't want the site to die, give it to someone else! You can always come back and play when you feel revitalized, or not.

 

The previous Admin of Sirocco did such a thing for us and I find it absolutely amazing. I didn't ask too many questions regarding why our founder needed to step down, but I imagine everyone has their own reasons, and honestly you do need to take care of yourself first!

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19 minutes ago, Zahhy said:

I just thought of this! (I'm not sure why I didn't sooner) but you can always give up admin status to another player or players. I never considered that there would be an emotional toll or that you would feel like you were posting for nothing. If there is still an interest and players and you don't want the site to die, give it to someone else! You can always come back and play when you feel revitalized, or not.

 

The previous Admin of Sirocco did such a thing for us and I find it absolutely amazing. I didn't ask too many questions regarding why our founder needed to step down, but I imagine everyone has their own reasons, and honestly you do need to take care of yourself first!

This solution can have varying success depending on the hosting situation though. If you're on a managed forum service, cool, or being hosted by a third party, but if the person who is hosting is the one who loses that motivation? There may not be anything you can do, though maybe you can get an export of the database to have the option to move elsewhere.

 

I know that if I lose motivation to run my game, chances are it won't have the option to be handed off to someone else. I self host, and I pretty much do all the admin work myself. In games past, I was part of a fleet, and it was very common for one game to get passed down from one command team to another over its life, so if one or more of the command team lost time or motivation, the game was usually passed down to the next senior most player with time and desire to take charge.

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"It is human nature to yearn to be what we were never intended for. It is singular, but it is so." -Mark Twain

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The struggle is real. I hang on way longer than I probably should. My sites are my babies. I have been able to accept when it's time to call it quits though and usually, I'll eventually reboot the site later and it becomes active again and then boom people vanish. 

 

I find the biggest struggle is when no one is active but they claim to want to be active. I just want players to be honest so other people aren't left waiting around wondering if they're coming back or not. I think that's a lot of what kills a site too if someone gets caught up in a plot with someone and that person just decides to piss off without warning then that player waits around not posting and then eventually gets discouraged and loses their muse cause they just waited and waited and then they too vanish. That's a lot of what I've seen at least. 

 

I actually never get sick of running a site so long as there are active people there enjoying it, I find it becomes a burden/unenjoyable when people aren't around/stop communicating. 

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When my previous site died, I accepted it after a  lot of thought on it. And then took a break, spending time as a member on a different site until I was ready to make my own site. 

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There are many factors that lead to it, but I believe the biggest one is when the fun is no longer there, and I understand the emotional drain too. I've been at a stage where my love of writing is still there, as is my love for the fandom, but my enthusiasm for rp is not there, so I'm just having some quiet time for myself, working on some ideas at my own pace and see how it goes from there.

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Transferring to another person isn't always an option. I mean sometimes no one else wants to take over and run things. (Perhaps they've experienced first hand how difficult running a site can be. It's not all sunshine and rainbows. Othertimes they don't think they'd be a good fit or even just don't want to.) 

 

Even if there is someone who wants to take over that doesn't even really mean much if the admin doesn't want to hand things over. They may not want to relinquish control over to someone else. Especially not if they've worked hard to build up a site and put countless hours into it. 

I can say for myself I wouldn't really want to hand it over to someone else. (Not unless I really trusted them.) But there's also the fact that as a self-hoster I have the money issue to worry about too. And in that case it's nowhere's near as simple to transfer ownership compared to on a JFH or IF forum. (I mean on a self-hosted one you have to transfer the domain over and transfer hosting or have them set up their own. Then make sure your info is no longer connected to it all so if something goes sour you're not on the hook for it.)

 

 

As for when a site is dead, it's a tough thing to say for sure. I mean on one hand it's not truly dead until the admin walks away. But in practice... some sites just don't take off. It might have nothing to do with the admin or site itself. It could just have been the ads never drew enough attention. (For one site I heard of it before it opened but by the time I'd found it was already a ghost town.) Maybe people thought it was cool but couldn't join right away. (I recall one site in particular I planned on joining but by the time I got got ready they'd already closed.)

 

As a solo admin too it's all too easy to get caught in the catch-22 of site admin... you need activity to get activity. But you can't really get activity without having others. (Yes, you can post with yourself... but that is very time consuming and tiring. And ultimately can't be sustained for long periods of time before you just burn yourself out.)

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  • 1 month later...

I just euthanized my forum this past week. The site had become too bogged down, and the remaining staff member and I couldn't handle it on our own. The nature of the site meant that it would be labor intensive, which I knew to a certain extent, but the problem was that there was no "pay off" for all of the work. All of my energy went into trying to keep it alive rather that nurturing it to thrive, and we barely had members. Unfortunately the site was built to host a large number of individual members (I had gotten good response from people I knew from years ago who either joined immediately or promised to join) and it never occurred to me that I should take into consideration that it also needed to function with only three active people.

 

So even though there were always two of us playing, we started to feel like we weren't playing for ourselves and for our characters but to fill in spaces and encourage activity from members who weren't there and guests who weren't joining. 

 

And thus we closed. I'm okay with it, and while I was a bit bummed, I was also very relieved.

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Site deaths are always a mixed bag of emotions, at least for me.

 

Back when I first started roleplaying, I poured so much time and energy into creating an awesome, totally original pokemon region (complete with its own dex). I can't even remember how active it was, since this was thirteen years ago, but it was for me and my close friends and it was pretty fun, if not a little cliche (I was thirteen...). I then remember being unhappy with the board itself, so I closed the site and made an entirely new board for the region, with new names for the island and everything. Ultimately, this new board never opened because of my own perfectionism. Everything had to be perfect, had to be complete, and because of school it just...never got done. To this day it still remains in admin mode, saved in my bookmarks because I like to look back at it.

 

Another site of mine died simply because I lost the time to keep running it. The rules were simple, the setup was simple, it could function with only a few players, but I lost interest because I became too busy with college. I had so little energy for much of anything that roleplaying just fell by the wayside. I'd been involved in so many threads with my co-admin that once I left, she left, too, and eventually the other members sort of faded away.

 

I think all the deaths of forums I've tried to run have taught me a lot about myself. I've learned that I prefer being a moderator, or simply just a member who contributes to site lore, that way I don't have to worry about juggling the responsibility of being an admin with the other responsibilities that need to take priority (like my health, work, etc).

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On 8/14/2017 at 8:25 PM, Uaithne said:

I just euthanized my forum this past week. The site had become too bogged down, and the remaining staff member and I couldn't handle it on our own. The nature of the site meant that it would be labor intensive, which I knew to a certain extent, but the problem was that there was no "pay off" for all of the work. All of my energy went into trying to keep it alive rather that nurturing it to thrive, and we barely had members. Unfortunately the site was built to host a large number of individual members (I had gotten good response from people I knew from years ago who either joined immediately or promised to join) and it never occurred to me that I should take into consideration that it also needed to function with only three active people.

 

So even though there were always two of us playing, we started to feel like we weren't playing for ourselves and for our characters but to fill in spaces and encourage activity from members who weren't there and guests who weren't joining. 

 

And thus we closed. I'm okay with it, and while I was a bit bummed, I was also very relieved.

With Fandoms, this is why writing fan fic is always an option - you can just forget about the participation of other people and trying to keep a site active and just write because you enjoy it. You can also do it for original concepts, too. Enjoyment of writing and creating is at the heart of what we do and sometimes I think we can put too much emphasis on getting other people involved.

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I've closed a board of mine that was very active due to the stress and negativity with a lot of members wanting to take over. I had struggled with pretending I was happy but in the end I had to shut the doors and though it got me a lot of flack for it, I was finally happy it was over. I left the rping word for 3 years before I decided to come back and give it another go.

 

My thing is you have to do what's best for you and your peace of mind. It's a hobby and should be an outlet for you to have fun with. Take a break and breathe and if you want to come back and give it another go make sure it's on your terms. Regardless if you're closing an active or inactive board, the main question for me is if I'm happy because being an admin is no walk in the park sadly.

 

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