Biggest Mistakes As A Forum Admin/Owner Have Made?

[Ozzy47]

Hey ladies and gents,

As a forum admin/owner, what have been the biggest mistakes you have made in forum administration and beyond?
Have you ever made the same mistake more than once? What did you do to fix the mistakes?

 

[Page]

The biggest mistake is not knowing what the flip you are doing and going straight into the business and having no knowledge at all. Seen that happen when members are just being bosh about not having what they want and or saying I can do better than you and so they go ahead and make their own site, and weeks later or months, they failed so badly.

I was lucky at the time since I was mods on many sites that used IPB and had some knowledge and learn more as I went into it myself.

 

[Deleted member 49125]

I had a forum some 15 years ago & had been a mod on several then & now. When I created my recent one, I had an idea of what people wanted so it helped me avoid some pitfalls. Learned by proxy lol
What irks me is people making a forum, not having members & activity after a month or two, closing it down, then creating a new one & expecting members & activity to just fall in their lap.
I started having a rule for myself, I won't join someone's third forum.
Even tho these aren't my mistakes, they are ones I have seen around.

 

[Ozzy47]

Yeah, many members think it’s easy to run a site and try one on their own, many fail.

 

[Page]

What irks me is people making a forum, not having members & activity after a month or two, closing it down, then creating a new one & expecting members & activity to just fall in their lap.

Always seen that happen all the time, JUst why not open the forum but all your affect into it and then rather closing it just keep it running as long as you can, not worrying about how inactive the site is.

Or many just give up as they are no lingering into gaming and want to get into a cooking forum.

 

[Deleted member 7467]

I create forums with the sole purpose of not having membership or activity. I'm usually pretty successful in this venture. So far, I haven't made any mistakes.

 

[Page]

Having no membership or activity, That's so easy 🙂 yet can be hard at the same time if you not watching who is joining. But I say why not make a discord server and rather than having a forum run a server for free on discord as a community. SInce people do not know how to type and read anymore and so they talk.

 

[Deleted member 7467]

Ha, you act as if I pay for forums I make.

 

[Katrina]

One big mistake that we did on Christianity Haven was to change the ways we did our forums and had a sub-forum for No Debate. It's what a group of people wanted, or at least, that's what they thought they wanted. It turned out, we created the sub-forum and I made a few topics and no one else participated. It wasn't really what those members thought would happen. So we ditched that idea.

 

[PGen98]

Mistakes I've made? Where do I begin?!

• When I was first getting into starting my own forums, I had no clue what I was actually doing, I jumped onto an EZBoard, gave it a terrible name, copied the forum layout from a community that, coincidentally, I wound up running myself years later, and then just expected people to come and post because, hey look, I've got what popularsiteX has, so it's just as good, right?!? Didn't understand the value of originality, the cost of content generation, or the impact of marketing.
• About 17 years ago at this point I had a co-admin that I thought I trusted. He decided he wanted to make new graphics for the forums, and so he did. I had given him FTP access, made him a full admin, etc. He was a friend, that was fine, right? Wrong. He decided that his graphics were worth $650 (I should point out, all he did was take the vBulletin graphics pack from their website, freely available, and recoloured them slightly...that's it...even I could do that), and he demoted me, banned my account, and held the site hostage until he got his money. Fortunately, I knew just enough to regain control of my forums, ban him, change the FTP details and ban his IP address, so I never had to deal with him again. Thankfully "super-administrators" became a thing not long after this, and I have never made the mistake of promoting someone I didn't 100% trust to that rank again.
• My first attempt to migrate hosts, about 19 years ago at this point, resulted in me completely deleting the database for my site at the time, without backups readily available. Lost 60,000 posts and 750 members, fortunately a decent amount re-joined at that forum went on to last a further 15 years
• I've made this mistake a few times, but I tend to spread myself too thin if I don't think things through, join too many other forums and forget about working on my own. Now I have a limit in my head and I prioritize my own forums as the first thing I tend to each day, and the last thing I tend to each night. Still lets me join other forums to have fun and/or help out, but without overwhelming myself.
• ...and many, many more!

Can't learn without a little failure 🙂

I've made so many mistakes down the years that I even at one point created a Forum Faux Pas, a list of what not to do based on things I'd seen or things I'd done, I still have a trimmed down version of it saved, just in case 😀

 

[Deleted member 49125]

@PGen98 Wow! I'm sorry that your so-called friend did that to you. That is one of the reasons I haven't had any Staff on mine. The best of friendships can break when they butt heads.
I have a system, a routine for forums. Mine & FP are the only ones I'm on daily. All others I'm on once a week in the mornings. It's a system that works for me as I can spend time on them. What irks me is because so many people are on so many forums, they treat it like an assembly line & sometimes even forget which forum they are on!

 

[PGen98]

@PGen98 Wow! I'm sorry that your so-called friend did that to you. That is one of the reasons I haven't had any Staff on mine. The best of friendships can break when they butt heads.

It certainly taught me a valuable lesson about trust, that's for sure! I've been very, very careful about who I pick for my own forums as staff members. No staff is a good approach, for sure, and something I likely will consider moving forward to any future projects, at least until I feel I need some help, but I also like having one to two people I can bounce ideas off of and generate a bit of a plan for various things. I do see the logic in no staff, though, a lot more straight forward!

I have a system, a routine for forums. Mine & FP are the only ones I'm on daily. All others I'm on once a week in the mornings. It's a system that works for me as I can spend time on them. What irks me is because so many people are on so many forums, they treat it like an assembly line & sometimes even forget which forum they are on!

I think that's a sensible system, most certainly. I tend to visit a fair few forums daily, but I'm good at keeping them separate from one another. You're right, though, you do end up with people who just shoot off canned replies or post the same content across every forum they post on. Originality is the key and keeping it fresh.