I am sure, during the course of your long/short foruming life, you would have come across a lot of instances where staff members and regular members post a thread telling that they are leaving never to return back.
While I understand that it is only a natural process for roleplaying forums, it isnt so with the rest of the niches. Do you support such things or would you discredit it as 'drama'?
In all of my experience with people posting that they will never come back (after whatever drama is making them want to leave), I have seen that the majority of those who do leave (roughly 80%) end up coming back to the forum that they stated that they wouldn't come back to.
I believe it mainly is due to the fact that the person enjoyed the forum so much, and just needed some cool off time, and is expecting that the situation that caused them to want to leave, has died off enough to come back without any problems.
I am the community manager for a RuneScape Private Server and we don't even allow quitting topics. The way we feel about it is that if they are truly leaving, they'll contact their friends in game, have alternate ways of contacting them, etc. and we view goodbye topics as a way of causing drama. For the most part, people also try to use them as a way to bash the staff but we have measures in place for goodbye topics that are outrageous in nature by making sure they have cool off time.
I've come across some members who 'leave', but end up coming back soon after (which makes them look silly). They make a huge speech which is like one page long (not literally, but you get the drift). Having a break of sorts is a much better option - if you're a dedicated and active poster, who cares genuinely about the community. For these reasons, I don't support it, and I would classify it as 'drama'.
It varies on how the person posts the topic I'd say. Some may just be informing everyone who might care about them that they're taking time to cool off or a respectable way of saying good bye to everyone.
But most of the time, its just people who are purposely trying to start drama within the thread by pointing out specific people and/or reasons they're leaving. That just stirs up the drama even more that's already going and gives them a public thread to argue. When new users see that stuff they get the feeling that the community is not what they wanted to be a part of and then you lose other members.
