Question To Forum Staff & Owners: What Challenges Do You Face Today?

Rick Ace

Rick Ace

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Let's start a listing of problems forum owners face today. And by that, I'm not exactly asking for problems that have been resolved or that occasionally bump up, but rather ongoing issues that you haven't resolved yet.

Some forums experience constant spam, low quality posts, low membership, trouble retaining members, or just low activity in general.

Please be thoughtful and specific. That way, we'll all get a clear sense of issues- issues that may not have been expected, and eventually find solutions for each other.
 
  • Keeping the forum updated, I mean checking to see things are always good in the logs
  • Content is the key and getting new content isn't easy, same with members base
  • Spam, bots or those people! lucky I don't get them on my site!yet others get allot.
  • keeping it alive in costs.. getting that amount of renew fee is an killer
  • trying to get those active members to say active
 
That's a very good list of issues lol. I'm sure a lot us can relate. 😀


What would you say about the costs of the forum @Empire? Are you referring to the domain renewal fees or something more than that?
 
Rick Ace said:
What would you say about the costs of the forum @Empire? Are you referring to the domain renewal fees or something more than that?
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Well, here the list
  1. Domain fees and the hosting costs! I always get the best deal and I did on Black Friday. cloud based hosting for three years as an total of $200. that's 65% off.
  2. Renewable licence fee for invision power. $120 a year
  3. I have site plugins that always needs to be renewable.
It adds up allot once you added it all.
 
Today...
Today I have a bilingual Zelda Community, or rather two communities that are practically dead. A job that because of unforeseen circumstances is claiming more of my time - to the point of feeling lucky if I can get a full day off - and will keep doing so until the year ends. Of course, this happened the day after I made public I had the intention to "soon" implement some changes around.

* My main issue is my lack of organization. I want to blame work and life because every time I am catching up and work my motivation something happens that requires my time more urgently. It is so easy to blame life rather than recognising I don't and will not have the time I used to have. I need to see this coming and organize myself so I can do things in small doses every day rater than one sitting catch-up.

* Organizing and having a staff that actually keep things rolling when I am not able to be there as often. Every time I appoint a team, they go inactive shortly after I do. The whole point of getting a team and assigning rules was to prepare for my upcoming time shortage and it was like nothing happened. So, I am assuming I had a problem with communication which I hope I can correct. I will never clean my hands and expect them to do all the work but I need them to help me on that when I can't be there and to reach out to me rather than just quit in their heads and not telling me about it.

* Low activity has rarely bothered me much by itself, I usually find that when I am around and we start joking and bonding activity increases fairly easy, so for now I feel what we get is fair. I am more worried about getting the ball rolling and then maintaining the momentum as I usually reach points where I am basically starting over activity-wise so I can't make a contest and hope that will drag people. I need to call them out with something simpler first and that part is not always easy for me.
 
@Kaynil: I feel your pain.

Over the past number of weeks, I've had some personal issues to deal with. I just didn't feel much like foruming, I was also extremely tired. Things are a bit better now though hehe.

I find that when the admins don't have time for the forum, even when moderators are actively involved, it still kinda goes dead-ish. It relies a lot on either me, or KT (other admin) being active there. The moderators are awesome, so there really isn't a reason why activity should go down while I'm away. It's a very strange issue.
 
Hahah, yeah. I think if you can't post, even if you login often it goes downhill. My problem is also that I am slow typer and I ramble a lot so a lot of times I have to keep drafting my replies and relying they won't get lost (especially on mobile, where I can't copy and paste them somewhere else myself with ease) so when I am short of time I read a lot but rarely manage to post. :/
 
Hehe! Yeah, trying to make a forum post on a phone is a pain in the butt. I usually end up half writing something, then going... "to hell with it, i'll log on the computer later."
 
making phone posts does take longer, it's an paid but at least you can able to do it
 
Shannon Apple said:
Hehe! Yeah, trying to make a forum post on a phone is a pain in the butt. I usually end up half writing something, then going... "to hell with it, i'll log on the computer later."
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That's quite a pain for forum owners too. A lot of the internet traffic has shifted to mobile, but many mobile devices just aren't writing-friendly.

Since forums mainly contain written content, this can be a challenge when trying to engage users.
 
Activity is a constant issue for me. My work schedule is so unpredictable. There are times when I'm scheduled off for a day and then I get called in. Or there are times when I'm working long hours. Or months where I get maybe 2-3 days off in that month. It's hard to be active when you get off work and the only thoughts are about preparing food and then going to bed (to do it all again the next day).
I do try to have a few topics in the "Drafts" feature so that on short notice I can post something. But I still have to get time to populate it first. (I usually only make some drafts if there's fresh content up in that section. So if I've posted in the tech section and come across an article I'll have that next topic ready to go later.)

I wouldn't be surprised if my sporadic activity has caused others to relax also. (Though it may also be that they're busier too. Hard to say for certain.) Which brings up another issue, it's hard to really be active when it seems like no one else wants to reply to topics. Like why post if no one seems to want to respond?
 
not knowing if people are creating fake/double accounts to deceive you
everyone nowadays knows how to work with a vpn, the whole ip tool thing you got going on in your admin panel is freaking useless now basically and it's bothersome

not just that, people using a vpn constantly, kind of hard to ban someone perm from your forum
if you ban their account and a certain ip they use often, sure but the person can easily come back to do whatever using a vpn, correct?
 
With regards to the phone posting comment, I see that as a problem with the software, not forums themselves. Discourse, for instance, was built with mobile in mind so it doesn't have the same usability issue.
 
The biggest challenge that most forum owners face is building up forum activity. Forums are dieing, people have moved onto social media. Be glad there is Exchanges, Packages and promotional forums around to assist you when your forum is inactive.
 
Pebbles said:
not knowing if people are creating fake/double accounts to deceive you
everyone nowadays knows how to work with a vpn, the whole ip tool thing you got going on in your admin panel is freaking useless now basically and it's bothersome

not just that, people using a vpn constantly, kind of hard to ban someone perm from your forum
if you ban their account and a certain ip they use often, sure but the person can easily come back to do whatever using a vpn, correct?
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I have successfully had a menace banned from his VPN for harassing one of our sites in the past. He was just a teenager, but he was doing some pretty damaging things as well as some thinly veiled threats against female members of staff. Believe it or not, it is a criminal offense and we could have pressed charges against him for a couple of offenses.

People think that they are safe doing whatever the fuck they want while using a VPN, but they're not. The world has moved on from the days were menaces could go around doing whatever and pulling down websites. If they're just spamming your site, you won't get far, but if they are doing criminal things to your site or online business, (OR threatening to visit your staff irl because they know where they live) you can do something about it. I spoke directly to the VPN company and they told me that while they couldn't give us personal info on the person, they would be holding his info for 6 months in the event that we take legal action.

I am a lot more tech savvy than I let on and I was able to find out this kid's real name and everything else through legal means. A friend who is an ethical hacker was helping me out too, but he also used very legal means. He backed off and promised to behave when we confronted him. He was quite shocked that someone like me would know a CEH hahah! He thought I knew nothing about tech. We didn't want to destroy a young kid's future career prospects, but hoped that he'd listen to my friend's advice and go white hat instead of black hat. XD.

My main point here is that you are never anonymous on the internet, unless you're a pretty skilled tech, so there are certain lines that they can't cross while hiding behind that VPN.

Someone coming back on new accounts is a mild issue. I'd just ban them each time. If they come back on a new account that you don't know about, and behave, everyone wins.
 
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Advertising is my only problem. Enough capital would need an off-line job - but there aren't enough dishwashing and grocery store ones in my particular area.
 
It's a curious situation because I used to deal with spam-bots, vulnerability scanners, etc. a lot in the past, and I flipped on admin activation on my newest site to deal with it. And nothing. Not a single spam-bot attempted to register.

A few years back, they would come in the truckloads, but now they're just... Gone. I don't get it. I get the occasional vulnerability / network scanner (zgrab, nmap, nikto, etc.), they're fun little things to watch as they do their business, although they seem obsessed with whether I have exposed phpMyAdmin installations, but no spambots.

Still, I'm putting together plans for if they do show up.
One I did notice though is that Cloudflare seems to be blocking sqlmap, I pointed it at myself and it poked through for a while before vanishing into oblivion. Very curious. Maybe that explains it?
 
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