Do you find that when you become inactive on your own forums - Your site gets dead?

[Page]

Let's say you have no time to spend time on your amazing built community or maybe blog in that matter. You are too busy with other life matters or maybe your internet is down for weeks for whatever reasons that if you become inactive.

So, if you get inactive does your site become the same. Your members see that there are no staff or admin being on they think YEAHH lets not bother or maybe they still are active. Point saying for me that every so often I'm not able to log into my own site and I leave for days to weeks and with that, if I'm not there to keep content going then the site becomes dead with me as I leave for that week.

Has anyone deal with that

 

[Ozzy47]

I’ve seen it on small to medium sites, on larger sites it really don’t seem to matter.

 

[Katrina]

Christianity Haven has finally reached the point where the members don't absolutely require me to make all the threads and respond to everyone. In fact, there are times when I DO respond in some of the theological threads and after that the thread dies. Admins can be thread killers when others are afraid to disagree with them 🙁 So lately I'm not AS involved in some of the threads and they've been going on for over 20 pages without my help. That's kind of nice.

I still need to make some type of new threads though every week when I see that people are logging in and not responding to anything. They're just looking for something that hasn't been written yet.

 

[Deleted member 17779]

If you don't have time for the community, then why not turn it over to someone that does?

 

[Page]

So lucky to have that going, It can be very hard, in fact for me you can spend so much time into it that after a while you just make yourself so tire and see it going downhill again.

If you don't have time for the community, then why not turn it over to someone that does?

It's finding someone though......

I had many staff members come and go. Also, most members on my end are from FP or sites that I do exchanges with and those that are staff members are also running their own forum community and they have their hands full already on their own spoon, rather than dealing another.

 

[MrDawn]

When I had my old anime forum, I found that to be one of my biggest problems. If I wasn't on there making fresh content for anyone to post to, then activity just up and died. Some forums are like that unfortunately.

 

[PGen98]

When I had my old anime forum, I found that to be one of my biggest problems. If I wasn't on there making fresh content for anyone to post to, then activity just up and died. Some forums are like that unfortunately.

Absolutely true, and it's moreso for smaller forums, because they're still trying to draw in people to form that core group. If the owner isn't there generating content to pull people in, then they're not going to get too far because it'll be seen as "well, if the owner doesn't even care, why should I?" Thankfully forums do reach a point of stability where you don't have to be around 24/7 generating content just to make things tick, and @Katrina is right, there are situations where admins can be counter-productive because eventually they gain an aura of authority, and that aura makes it difficult for people to want to disagree with them. So it's a double-edged sword of recognizing when to step up and when to pull back.

 

[Dismal_Bliss]

If it's a young community then yes it could suffer.

My forum #1 is 17 years old and these days there are several admins and moderators. It can run on auto-pilot indefinitely with or without me.

My forum #2 in my signature is still in it's infancy. If I were to disappear, so would everyone else.

 

[zappaDPJ]

I look in on all my forums almost every day, usually multiple times a day even if it's only for a couple of minutes.

I guess it's become a habit but it makes little or no difference whether I post because my forums are generally driven by events rather than anything else e.g. one of my forums provides support for an ISP and the UK is heading towards a complete switch off of our Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN) and Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) in favour of a fully digital network that uses Internet Protocol (IP) across a fibre based service.

That's lead to an exponential increase in traffic on my forum primarily because it leaves VoiP as the only replacement for a home phone service and the majority of the population (I'd say 99%) have no idea how that will impact them.

 

[Ghost]

Christianity Haven has finally reached the point where the members don't absolutely require me to make all the threads and respond to everyone. In fact, there are times when I DO respond in some of the theological threads and after that the thread dies. Admins can be thread killers when others are afraid to disagree with them 🙁 So lately I'm not AS involved in some of the threads and they've been going on for over 20 pages without my help. That's kind of nice.

I still need to make some type of new threads though every week when I see that people are logging in and not responding to anything. They're just looking for something that hasn't been written yet.

That's very true, I've seen this happen. I'm on another forum still and the owner is very strongly opinionated (and I disagree with his views) - it makes it hard to have a discussion when he says certain things. I don't remember ever feeling that way on FP, so I think it really is more about the person who says it more than their staff title, but that's just in my experience.

When I had forums in past I really only had 1 that felt like it was moving without my help but I converted it from a webmaster/forum-admin discussion site and made it a general discussion forum which actually killed it. It was Bibbo.org, only active for a short stint many years ago but maybe some people here will remember it.

Found some archives of it:

 

[Felly]

Definitely with smaller sites because you're basically part of that core group of members. But I've been on larger sites where I haven't seen staff driving conversation as much because the members just do it all. I think that's the hardest part too, is finding that opportunity where you can safely step back and not have to stress about driving the conversation anymore because it's all under control.

It's kinda demoralizing in a sense if you start to feel like you're the one doing everything, and I feel like it can really lead to burn out if you can't get things kicked off and don't have the drive or time to keep doing it. I know I've been staff on several forums (either ones I've created or just ones where I became a part of staff), and I just couldn't continue because I couldn't keep committing time to something and being the only one trying to drive it and start the conversations. Same with blogs I've tried to start up -- I'm good for a little while in the beginning when the excitement is there, but not having the engagement really kinda makes you question if it's really worth it in the first place.

 

[Fidelia]

The admin of a forum is like the president of a country. The other members draw inspiration from the admin. If the admin is not present, they would lose motivation and stay away from the site. It is a natural human behaviour.

 

[Page]

The admin of a forum is like the president of a country. The other members draw inspiration from the admin. If the admin is not present, they would lose motivation and stay away from the site. It is a natural human behaviour.

Not just one ingle admin but having more then one admin helps

 

[Baw$e]

If owners, and admins are inactive for too long a site will die down. You need to update, and maintain your forums if you want growth.

 

[xGaymr]

I can can see why this happens, the only thing I would do on my forum is give my most active member some sort of rank that draws some sort of content creation or moderation duties. Also if your forum supports scheduled posts for fresh content that would be ideal!

 

[cpvr]

The admin of a forum is like the president of a country. The other members draw inspiration from the admin. If the admin is not present, they would lose motivation and stay away from the site. It is a natural human behaviour.

I agree. I also consider the admin of a forum to be like the farmer of a field. You have to plant the seeds, water them, and continue to nurture them.

 

[Ravenfreak]

I definitely believe that once the site owner or admins stop logging into the forum, it'll become a ghost town. People will notice that you're not around and they won't bother sticking around either. Eventually the forum will go offline since the owner might stop paying for hosting, or at least this is the mindset I get when I see an inactive admin.

 

[Nomad]

If you are not active and if you do not have organic activities on your forum, consider your forum to be dead

 

[dojo]

If I would keep my forums active even during me being not too committed, I'd be a millionaire right now. Forums ca stay slightly inactive with no issues, as long as they have the platform updated and run smoothly. Now, even if I cannot be always active, I'll keep it there. Worst case scenario, you pay for posting and you still get some content on.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

It depends.

It depends on membership and activity.

I had a forum with over 10K members and 100,000+ posts. I could usually take a weekend off and come back to an active forum going on without me.

I have a Facebook group with over 45,000+ members. I don't have to be that active there at all! It stayed active pretty much all day and all night.

My new forums that I run now require me to be active.

I think if the forum is new, small, or built around you, then you'll need to be the one to stay active to keep it alive.