Being an administrators has it's perks but also the sometime neglected negative parts to the job.
For example, at the young age of 14, I was an administrator in a Windows OS type forum, with around 200 users, but I got booed off of the role in the end due to some decisions I made during my time there.
I have also seen administrators on my sites, be generally disliked and hated by the community and been in that situation, I think they do well, but what do the community think? And that has lead to many issues.
I think it happens to everyone. There are times where you get extremely motivated and in the mood to work hard, and then there's times where you feel like doing absolutely nothing. It has happened to me plenty of times before.
I have burnt out quite a few times as both a forum admin and a heavily used site admin. Sometimes it feels the more work you do, the more work you will have to do again. It's a never ending battle to stay motivated.
One of the most important things that I think you can do, is have a forum subject that you are interested in, and passionate about. Make the forum more about posting, than it is about adminning. That is certainly my own philosophy and helps to ensure that you remain interested in the subject long past the point you finish up tinkering with addons, skins and mods.
My forum was created and has many diverse members from day one because of this exact issues. We had been posting on another site and one day it just shut down without warning. The message read, "We are briefly closed for some scheduled website maintenance so just keep hitting refresh until we're back online...it's not like you've got anything better to do 🙂" and it has been like that for over a month now. We had noticed the admin has slowly stopped posting more and more and wonder if he just lost interest and shut down.
I feel terrible because he had messaged me to help him mod and I had refused. I had run a forum for over a year already and had give up on it and just walked away leaving it dusty and vacant after a short while of me leaving. If he had expressed burnout to me I would have been more willing to support him but I was really enjoying just posting with no responsibility.
After realizing the forum was not coming back I have now taken on the responsibility of running a forum for my friends and others that were regular posters on that site. I fear burnout often since I have already experienced it.
I am being proactive by looking at ways to promote my site to bring in new members with new ideas. I am hoping this will keep the forum fresh so there will be many diverse members and topics to discuss. I also have appointed a moderator for the "drama llama" forum and he has been wonderful so far. He seems cautious and wants to make sure he doesn't do something I will not approve of but I think that is just because he is just now starting out at moderating with me and just needs to sort out exactly what I expect and what members expect.
In regards to my post on the OTT rules reply in this area, I was once burned out because I locked the rules thread because everybody replied using red text. I have been burned out a few times while being staff on a few various forums, but never as badly as discussed below.
Let's start our tale. I loved browsing through youtube in those days (3 years ago) and I was browsing my recommended for you when I saw an OsTester based guy (won't reveal channel name) and a had a lot of subscribers and videos. I checked them out and noticed he had a forum. Prior to this I was going through a bad state (with an addiction I won't talk about) and when I made a few mistakes on the forum (from my phone and under that addiction) I got the moderators against me. Now the owner was a lovely guy, we are friends now but he let the community choose the admins (view my post on that also) So the staff there were a little, power abusive to say the least. I ended up getting a few warnings and I swore at a moderator after he told me I was (swear wording) him off. I then ended up in a Wember group, where I couldn't read any forum but an isolation board and I literally lost it. The owner (kind person) saw it was unfair (on my better day) and spoke to me. Anyway better hurry my story along. The forum split when the owner quit leaving the semi admin in charge and made his own operating system based game, having members from that forum. He had a beat testing program and he chose me to be one privately due to my bad state. Sadly he told his trusted friend who told his trusted friend and it kept going onto less trustworthy people and I was exposed. At this point I was a mini-moderator but was already hated due to creating two multiple accounts on the other split forum (a tech based one) I was straight up banned my the new admin who hated my guts as i swore and tried to get him fired several times for abusive warning messages. Anyway that's two reasons I was hated. Soon I loved the forum, but we were using a free host so I offered a paid host. That was me instantly promoted to moderator but that didn't go down well. But this isn't about moderator burn outs is it. The new forum I was promoted to admin on and this is where I was burned out....
There's more to that tale that I removed bits of, if I really am such a good writer you can ask me via pm for the full story and I'll send you a copy of what I drafted this post to be.
