Staffing Failing in Running a Site

[anthrxmilkshake 86]

I cannot be the only one! 

 

I know a lot of roleplayers out there think "I can do this better" or "Man I have a great idea I want to RP out". How many of you have actually ventured into an attempt to own your own forum? Were they as unsuccessful as mine? Because, let me tell you, I failed so hardcore it was actual comical. What are some of your horror stories and fails when it came to your adventure into forum ownership? 

 

Note this is not a bash thread, and if you're coming here to bash a member, or someone else, for the fall of your forum, this is not the place. Just here for those of us who pushed, tried, and fell on our faces.

[Deep Sea 326]

Most recent RP I started, started two weeks late because lol what is time management. We're a month in, and my setting thread is still incomplete.

[Morrigan 1,826]

I like to play some really niche things and so it's a hard thing to get off the ground. I once did a SW Clones site forever ago and it just ended up being me for a while and the other members were sorta back and forth and then I sorta disappeared because I didn't have enough to play with. >_<

[Quell 249]

I opened a Golden Compass site one time because ugh. it's so great. I did not know then, but wow was there not a big enough fan base for Golden Compass to get a site rolling. also our apps were insane, now that I'm looking back on them. Live an learn, I guess. XD

[Set 2]

Aaaah this is so cringy lol but as a young tween I made a board with friends, wanted help, got mad when the friend I asked didn't want to be a mod....aaaaaaaaaaaaaand promptly threw a hissy fit and grumbled the site to death. Oh sweet immature youth. I think running a successful board requires a mix of professionalism, dedication, and most importantly LUCK! There is no perfect science. I've been with great boards that fizzled and derivative drama houses that flourished. In hindsight, I think passion and professionalism help a lot but at the end of the day that 'magic sauce' needs to be there too. So don't feel bad!

[xexes 108]

All of them. It's funny because people have told me that they think well of me and... every single thing I have tried to do on my own has failed horribly.

 

On Ezboard a friend convinced me to start a wolf roleplay with her. I ended up doing all the work, they never played, and we had about two barely-there people. She called it quits.

 

Then, back for seconds, a friend threw a sob story so several people pitched in to help her make her board. I did the majority of the work. When it opened, she logged in once and never again. We shut it down in two weeks.

 

I started a roleplay and attracted three members, two whom were barely active and one whom only wanted to play a three-headed dog on this realistic wolf site. I closed it in two weeks because I was so discouraged and this just wasn't the kind of people I wanted to play with.

 

And then a friend and I started collaborating this massive, custom stat site that was more of a video game baked into a forum. I spent months and months worth of hard programming, hundreds and hundreds of hours of my time, the quality of work people pay for. And this friend? Eh, they'd maybe worked four hours on a picture. They always claimed to have more but I never seemed to see it. I threw in the towel.

 

And then I decided that a choice between only two active Black Jewels sites was not good enough and made my own, but it had a bunch of fantasy and no one could relate in this tiny genre of "everyone doing the exact same thing over and over again even though it clearly doesnt work well since all the sites are always dying". I got one member and closed five days later.

 

Believe me, I always have more site ideas, but by now I have accepted that my sites go as my real life friends do: no one can relate to me, I just don't have that charismatic quality that draws people in. Co-adminning with someone else always works out super well, though, I do all the stuff and they draw the people in. Admins love me. It's just I suck on my own super bad; "always the bridesmaid, never the bride.".

 

 

 

Edited September 20, 2017 by xexes

[Sparky Muse 16]

The site I am currently running is failing pretty hard. So far I haven't got an single other member yet after almost two weeks. Another site I was on a while ago that lasted for years and was a sort of crime-based city-with-powers/metahumans rp finally got to the point where it finally died down, and in a way i sort of wanted to try reviving it. I'm not giving up on doing that. But, I also changed a few things to add more places the other site didn't have, and while I didn't make it crime-based I did put in four groups that run the city. It might be because of my idea for optional stats, or it might be because of the large amount of reading I made for backlore and setting (i have difficulties with restraint) or my boring-looking forum, or perhaps people aren't interested, or because of unusual things like my site's abbreviated name, or because I'm a bit honest that I'm not the most skilled admin, exactly, and kinda lazy, but either way, things aren't biting. Doesn't mean I'm gonna give up, though. I'm currently planning on finding ways to keep improving the site and writing up one-shots for my characters until other members join. The way I figure it, I put too much time and effort into it, and it's too close of a thing to my heart to give up on it until I'm told otherwise. I also spent 80$ on jcink premium for it, so I have a year to make that purchase worth it. I still haven't made a site where optional stats (speaking of which, anybody know anything about jcink's IBstore? I'm wondering if that might help a bit) are a thing, either, so whether I die first, become incapable of being able to be a roleplayer for some reason or another but aren't dead, such as I suffer a brain injury or lose my arms, or I accomplish my goals, I'mma keep at it, no matter how hard of a failure this is going out as and no matter how much dignity I have to lose.

I've made several attempts at making sites before this, but either I've lost interest, or because I was too indecisive years ago and kept changing things about the themes, or kept going from board to board, but I don't think I've ever actually run a successful site. Other sites I've been on, I keep disappearing for a bit, then coming back and wanting to restart my characters, because I keep having different ideas for different plotlines for them. So, both as a forum owner and as a forum roleplayer, I've been failing spectacularly for at least a decade now.

Edited September 20, 2017 by Sparky Muse

[Elena 546]

I am Elena and I am running "Before the Mast" for seven years, but lately I feel that I am failing both my expectations and others'  

 

I also am not sure if to mark an unopened site as a failure, or it would have been a failure only if officially opened and not taking off. Because I have such one too, a Viking site made in 2013 and never opened because i couldn't find a committed co-administrator to run it with me.  I have written most documentation, it is there on an Invisionfree site (so most likely it will be lost with the invisionfree change), I had attempts at people promising to join and share it with me, but they registered, in rare cases they put a bio and it got approved... and nothing more. In other cases, not even a bio. So the site has the record number of ... 3 or 4 started threads, one of them being finished (a 8-posts one), and ...it never got officially opened, because I definitely am not made to run a site alone.

 

If it is COLLABORATIVE WRITING, then everything should be shared, in my opinion. If I wanted to write alone, I wouldn't need a forum for it. (And the proof is that my Viking book, including the characters I had brought to the RPG and many others, got published one year and a half ago, and got about 230-250 copies sold and at least 8 favourable critics articles in my writer's portfolio). 

 

Now, back to "Before the Mast", which I know it could be counted as a success for being opened for 7+ years, never one day closed, and running a coherent adventure story which encompasses more than one year and a half of the West Indies' saga (January 1719-August 1720 and counting). Why do I feel it as a failure somehow too? Because while we had bout 40 members at our peak, now we have only 8. Or, rather, we have 8 stable members, the "youngest" having joined us in early 2014, the "oldest" 2 back in 2010, but they got slower and slower as life responsibilities and health problems came over them. If we had posts every day, even if not in all threads, now most of them can take 3-4 weeks or more until they post. And the two more active ones, ie me and another, can't invent as many threads only between us in the meanwhile, because it doesn't make sense. 

 

The people who had joined in the last 2-3 years, didn't stay, even if we encouraged them to post often and we, the 2 most active ones, had threads with them (also the others did, and we have a focus on collective threads, given that we are a plot-driven site). Some simply went over to the next shiny thing, others wanted more characters and writers to write with, and not so much time to wait for the others' posts.

 

I don;t know how to get new members of the staying kind (provided that I can post almost every day, 1-2 posts, so they wouldn't be idle if they wanted to write and get integrated into the story). I asked for advice on other 2 resource sites, but the answers I received were a good recipe to lose my dedicated membership and nothing to really help me. Yes, the members are slow now (even if they weren't for several years before), but they are dedicated to the story and we have achieved a lot. They aren't abandoning me, even if it seems sometimes so by the long time between posts. They return to post, however, while the newer ones have vanished long time ago, and this is commendable.

 

For those who are afraid to join a 7 years old site (even if they shouldn't, because it means it is there to stay, not to disappear in a whim), we are passing to a new chapter of the story on a new site, lowering the seafaring focus in favour of colonial focus. But even for this I am slacking, because I feel exhausted and there are things I can't do alone. I have done a lot, and my co-administrator contributed with the skin, graphics, coding, including the mending of photobucket crisis. But I simply can't do anything more, so I focus on writing. Somebody has to write.

Edited September 20, 2017 by Elena

[Dragon 673]

Honestly, I think the content of a couple of discussion threads (i.e. least favorite skin trends, that's a deal breaker, etc) here outline the difficulties of running a successful site almost perfectly. It pretty much boils down to it being impossible to please everyone, and drawing in the people you can please is just luck of the draw. The more niche your topic is, the less likely you are to have any kind of success; but at the same time, the more popular the subject, the harder it is to compete especially when other sites' staff have a superior range of skills (coding, graphics etc)

 

I remember reading those threads while my current site was floundering (there's a lot of good advice in them despite the point I'm making atm), and I was so disheartened by the realization that 'everyone hates everything' (figuratively of course) that I almost gave up and just shut it all down. Which is another issue in and of itself, figuring out when you need to power through it vs throw in the towel. Retrospectively, I think I shut a couple of sites down too quickly because I didn't feel like enough people had joined the first week or two; because the most successful one I ever ran didn't get any new blood for almost two months, it was just me and friends made on other sites. That one ended up running for years before closing down. 

 

Running a site has become incredibly demanding. You're expected to have perfect layouts, great graphics, flawless rule sets blah blah blah. People will turn their noses up at an otherwise wonderful site if one thing is wrong with any of that and so much more. I think probably 90% of sites created, if not more, end up failing within the first year if they even get up off the ground. I know my failure to success rate is pretty woeful. 

 

And, unfortunately, even if you manage to do all of that stuff perfectly you might end up watching everything crash and burn because of drama between your members. So I think its all just hit or miss, and unfortunately there's no right answer or solid formula for success. 

 

[CovertSphinx 710]

Pretty much any site I've started after the "Hay Day" of endless anime RPs and crossovers has been a technical failure. But, I'm done worrying about what OTHER people will or won't like. I guess I just grew to enjoy Niche's that either don't have a visible base, or are too close in genre to other longer-established sites. 

 

I think an unsaid part of it is that people are more "scared" than they used to be when joining a site. When I first started RPing, a majority of people I knew would join 2, 3, sometimes upward of 5 or 6 sites without worry of whether the site was still going to be there 2 weeks later. They weren't worried about all the hard work in getting set up being a "waste of time". And if 2 of those 3 sites didn't live long, they found that 3rd site that they end up staying at Mainstream, and every so often find another secondary or tertiary site. Nowadays, I feel like people are scared of "wasting their time" on sites with only 2 members, fearing that there's no hope for the site if there's not already an established community. 

[Sparky Muse 16]

@Elena Yeah, I've thought about writing alone, but I really don't want to a published or professional writer. I would really like (I'm trying to avoid using the word "love") to be writing with others, but I'm very picky about my sites and I try and keep to the same characters, because those characters I really do love. For the moment, I'm writing one-shots to try and keep showing there's still somebody on the site, I'm still trying, and even if I wind up embarrassing myself, which I probably am, I'll keep going from there, because I'm by no means willing to give up yet. In the meantime I'm also looking into things to try and improve the site's functionality and appearance, so that when the time comes I can try (and probably fail) to be a better admin.

I do think a lot of it is timing, too; I think there might be better parts of the year to start or open a roleplay, but I'm not observant enough to figure out which ones. I haven't seen a lot of people bring that one up, but there are others in my family who complain our family has always had terrible timing.

[Elena 546]

@Sparky Muse, I don't believe in timing. Always there is going to be something hindering someone to join. And the same month being an incentive for another. One shots (or several characters interacting, regular threads are a possibility too) are very good. Journals are good too, and a site is really down only when the staff has lost hope and gives up.

 

Lucky you that you are good on the IT technical side too~! Unfortunately I am not. I can write, this is my call, and I can manage, because I work project management since 1994. Coding and graphics aren't for me.

 

I don;t think you are embarassing yourself. You are pursuing your dream, and you are reliable, both things very nice. You would need to get a few of your friends writing with you, at least for the soft opening, though.

Edited September 20, 2017 by Elena

[Sparky Muse 16]

At the moment, I don't really think I'm good with IT tech, I'm just googling and using a lot of how-to resource sites to figure out what I don't know. Or, I'm putting in requests to help out, although I haven't had much luck in that area. Sometimes I'm slow; for example, the idea of googling "how to make a skin tutorial" hasn't hit my head before, so that's something I'm going to have to do soon too. I'll probably google it tonight, study it a little gradually, and then think about what I want to do with it until I eventually commit myself to it.

The other thing I'm doing as I write one-shots is giving my characters history that takes place before the start of the site's timeline/their character profiles with a lot of unnamed and gender-neutral characters, so that when people join in the site later, there are ideas present that are not technically canon that people can insert their own characters for as a way of saying our characters have "interacted".

Currently i have a lot of things I'm holding back about site history because I either haven't fully fleshed out my ideas, am planning on making events with them later and want them to be a surprise, or because they're not supposed to be "generally known" although anybody who asks, I'll tell them. I currently have a small novel's worth of lore and backstory and setting, though, on the site, which probably isn't good, but I figured people didn't really want any more than that.

At the moment I've been kind of a lazy roleplayer, who hasn't done much lately, so I don't have too many/possibly any people who I can ask to join. There's nobody near my physical location, anyways. It's going to be my biggest weakness at the moment, probably.

Edited September 21, 2017 by Sparky Muse

[Huskerdust 625]

To some people, I think I look like a failure. I've never run a site with more than like 10~ or so members on it. I've never run a popular site. I've JOINED sites and thought "How the heck do the admins DO this?" because there would be 20, 30, 40 DIFFERENT MEMBERS and many of them on daily, in the cbox, and everything! It flabbergasted me and I admit, I began to see MYSELF as a failure because I've never had that kind of community and honestly? Probably never will. 

 

Even when I run fairly popular concepts (like the ever present modern supernatural site), I know it will never reach the heights of sites I've been on because of the software. Every popular site I've been on was on JCINK. And people, as some others have pointed out, are very particular, very picky, and will snub their noses at every little thing. I've struggled a lot with the software choice but every time I try to work with Jcink, I just end up frustrated and end up moving to SMF anyway. So... there's no point to me ever starting out on something just to get more members because in the end, I'm going back to what *I* like best eventually. I don't like Jcink. It's not for me. It's tolerable enough as a member but as a staff member? No. I cannot do it. 

 

Failure is really in your own eyes. For me, I've since dropped that "Oh no, I'm not good enough" feeling as long as I have my favorite writers by my side and I can plot, thread, and RP with them. If that means only having 5 members who show up daily, that is fine with me. 

 

But yes, I have failed even in my own eyes in the past, many times.  Things happen and that makes it harder for me to feel connected to a site to the point where I cannot even look at it. I've also become much more single-minded over the years. Whereas I was once able to RP on 10+ sites at once I can now only handle one. The sad part is, I need variety so I need new settings, new types of RP every now and again... I cannot handle just being in the same setting forever and ever. And once I move on from a setting, it becomes harder to go back to it later on, even when I intend to. 

 

So in that regard, I have failed myself and other people. I always feel sick and guilty when I need to close a site for my own selfish reasons but it's happened multiple times. 

[Uaithne 543]

I've failed a lot. I've also been successful a couple of times, and sometimes it's hard to deal with present failures because I look at the successes and say, "Why can't I be like that again?"

 

Way back in the day, I was a serial site maker. I'd come up with some wildly crazy idea, make a site (I could make the site, documents, and skin within 24 hours back before perfection and coding every darn thing took over), and advertise like mad. I'd be very, very, very active, and then I'd miss a day.

 

All it took was one missed day for some completely random IRL reason to destroy my impulsively made creation. I'd drag my feet in returning to the site for some unknown reason. After a couple days, the pressure of all the things left undone, all the apps that needed to be approved, all the people who were waiting for me to return built up in my mind and it was just too much . . . So I'd vanish. And then awhile later, I'd return and start a new site. People always joined because I was so laid back and had creative ideas, but I'd ultimately fail them.

 

This went on for years. And years. And so many dead sites.